Regression analysis of clustered interval-censored failure time data with cure fraction and informative cluster size

Abstract

Clustered interval-censored failure time data occur in many areas and many methods have been proposed for their analysis. In practice, in addition to the clustering and interval censoring, such data may also present two other issues, cure fraction and informative cluster size, and it does not seem to exist an approach that can deal with all of these issues together. To address this, we present a within-cluster resampling method and in the approach, the multiple imputation procedure is applied for estimation of unknown parameters. To assess the performance of the proposed method, a simulation study is conducted and suggests that it works well in practical situations. Also the method is applied to a set of real data that motivated this study.

Keywords:

• Clustering
• interval censoring
• cure fraction
• informative cluster size
• within-cluster resampling
• multiple imputation

MATHEMATICAL SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION:

• 62P10
• 62P65

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Balakrishnan, the Associate Editor and a reviewer for their many helpful and useful comments and suggestions that greatly improved the paper.