Regression analysis of multivariate interval-censored failure time data with a cured subgroup and informative censoring

Abstract

Multivariate interval-censored failure time data occur when a failure time study involves several related failure times of interest and only interval-censored observations are available for each of them. Although a great deal of literature has been established for their regression analysis, there does not seem to exist an approach that applies to the situation where there exist both a cured subgroup and informative censoring, the focus of this paper. For the problem, a class of semiparametric transformation non-mixture cure models is presented and a two-step estimation procedure is proposed. For the implementation of the proposed method, an EM algorithm is developed. Numerical results suggest that the proposed method works well for practical situations and an application is provided.

Keywords:

• Informative censoring
• multivariate interval-censored data
• non-mixture cure model
• transformation model

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Editor, Prof. Wenbin Lu, the Associate Editor and two reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions that greatly improved the paper. The R code for the implementation of the proposed method is available from the second author upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).