Empirical Likelihood Ratio Confidence Intervals for Conditional Survival Probabilities with Right-Censored Data

• Activity Number: 22
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 4, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Tonya Riddlesworth*+ and Jian-Jian Ren
• Companies: Tennessee Technological University and University of Maryland at College Park
• Keywords: right censored data ; confidence intervals ; empirical likelihood ; conditional survival probability

Abstract

In the analysis of survival data, we often encounter situations where the response variable (the survival time) T is subject to right censoring, but the covariates Z are completely observable and are often discrete or categorical. In this article, we construct the empirical likelihood ratio confidence region for conditional survival probabilities based on bivariate data which are subject to right censoring in one coordinate and have a discrete covariate Z. We show that such empirical likelihood ratio confidence region is indeed an interval, and we establish some related properties of the empirical likelihood ratio. The generalization of our results in this article to the multivariate covariate Z with dimension p>1 is straightforward. This is a joint work by Jian-Jian Ren and Tonya Riddlesworth.