Regression analysis of doubly censored failure time data with frailty time data with frailty

The timings of two successive events of interest may not be measurable, instead it may be right censored or interval censored; this data structure is called doubly censored data. In the study of HIV, two such events are the infection with HIV and the onset of AIDS. These data have been analyzed by authors under the assumption that infection time and induction time are independent. This paper investigates the regression problem when two events arc modeled to allow the presence of a possible relation between two events as well as a subject-specific effect. We derive the estimation procedure based on Goetghebeur and Ryan's (2000) piecewise exponential model and Gauss-Hermite integration is applied in the EM algorithm. Simulation studies are performed to investigate the small-sample properties and the method is applied to a set of doubly censored data from an AIDS cohort study.