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Activity Number: 369
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2008 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Nonparametric Statistics
Abstract - #302703
Title: Separating Borrowing Information and Forming Contrasts: Nonparametric Inference for Arbitrary Functionals of Survival
Author(s): Kyle Rudser*+ and Scott S. Emerson and M. L. LeBlanc
Companies: University of Washington and University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Address: Department of Biostatistics, Seattle, WA, 98195,
Keywords: Semiparametric and nonparametric methods
Abstract:

The hazard ratio is commonly used for comparing survival distributions across groups. While easily estimated in the presence of censored data, it does not allow for the clinical relevance of differences in survival across groups to be easily judged. We consider an approach to nonparametric inference for clinically meaningful functionals of a survivor distribution (e.g., restricted mean, quantiles). In this approach we use different models to borrow information across sparse data than to form contrasts. Linear contrasts are evaluated and compared on root mean squared error and coverage between approaches using nonparametric recursive partitioning, Cox's proportional hazards, and Buckley-James' linear regression with censored data. The nonparametric approach was superior when semiparametric model assumptions were violated, and had a slight loss of efficiency when such assumptions do hold.


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