Joint HGLM approach for repeated measures and survival data

In clinical studies, different types of outcomes (e.g. repeated measures data and time-to-event data) for the same subject tend to be observed, and these data can be correlated. For example, a response variable of interest can be measured repeatedly over time on the same subject and at the same time, an event time representing a terminating event is also obtained. Joint modelling using a shared random effect is useful for analyzing these data. Inferences based on marginal likelihood may involve the evaluation of analytically intractable integrations over the random-effect distributions. In this paper we propose a joint HGLM approach for analyzing such outcomes using the HGLM (hierarchical generalized linear model) method based on h-likelihood (i.e. hierarchical likelihood), which avoids these integration itself. The proposed method has been demonstrated using various numerical studies.