Semiparametric Extended Hazard Cure Models

• Activity Number: 160
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Risk Analysis
• Author(s): Chen-Hsin Chen*+ and Ken-Ning Hsu
• Companies: Academia Sinica (Institute of Statistical Science) and Academia Sinica (Institute of Statistical Science)
• Keywords: Accelerated failure time cure model ; Accelerated hazards cure model ; Deviance ; Extended hazard cure model ; Proportional hazards cure model ; Spline

Abstract

For right censored survival data in presence of cure, we propose a new class of cure models, which include the proportional hazards (PH) cure model, the accelerated failure time (AFT) cure model, and the accelerated hazards (AH) cure model as special cases. Mixture regression cure models have been developed to formulate the cure proportion and the conditional survival distribution of uncured subjects with a logistic regression and a semiparametric survival regression, respectively. In this study, we generalize them to the EH cure models via an alternating algorithm to obtain the maximum likelihood estimators of the model parameters by approximating the unspecified underlying hazard function with spline functions. We use the boundary hypothesis test of the parameter space to derive the asymptotic distribution of the deviance for selecting a suitable cure model among the PH cure, AFT cure, AH cure, or some other EH cure models in analyzing a dataset. The proposed approach to EH cure models is evaluated in simulation studies, and illustrated in an analysis of Stanford heart transplant data.