Abstract:
|
In the presence of time-dependent confounders, a marginal structural model could be used for survival analysis instead of the standard Cox proportional hazards model. Westreich and colleagues developed adjusted Kaplan-Meier type survival estimators by inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to accompany such a marginal structural model. However, previous work has not addressed how to construct the corresponding confidence intervals. Quantifying the uncertainty of IPTW-adjusted Kaplan-Meier survival estimators is important for valid comparisons between groups at specified time points. In the present study, we propose a method to construct pointwise confidence intervals around IPTW-adjusted Kaplan-Meier survival curves. We also apply this methodology using the dataset from the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study under two different time scales.
|