• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.389-402
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• 2023

Multivariate or clustered failure time data often occur in many medical, epidemiological, and socio-economic studies when survival data are collected from several research centers. If the data are periodically observed as in a longitudinal study, survival times are often subject to various types of interval-censoring, creating multivariate interval-censored data. Then, the event times of interest may be correlated among individuals who come from the same cluster. In this article, we propose a unified linear regression method for analyzing multivariate interval-censored data. We consider a semiparametric multivariate accelerated failure time model as a statistical analysis tool and develop a generalized Buckley-James method to make inferences by imputing interval-censored observations with their conditional mean values. Since the study population consists of several heterogeneous clusters, where the subjects in the same cluster may be related, we propose a generalized estimating equations approach to accommodate potential dependence in clusters. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed estimator is robust to misspecification of working covariance matrix and statistical efficiency can increase when the working covariance structure is close to the truth. The proposed method is applied to the dataset from a diabetic retinopathy study.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2014

Ordinary survival analysis cannot be applied when a significant fraction of patients may be cured. A cure rate model is the combination of cure fraction and survival model and can be applied to several types of cancer. In this article, the cure rate model is considered in the interval censored data with a cluster effect. A shared frailty model is introduced to characterize the cluster effect and an EM algorithm is used to estimate parameters. A simulation study is done to evaluate the performance of estimates. The proposed approach is applied to the smoking cessation study in which the event of interest is a smoking relapse. Several covariates (including intensive care) are evaluated to be effective for both the occurrence of relapse and the smoke quitting duration.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.331-343
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• 2014

We propose two estimating procedures to analyze clustered interval-censored data with an informative cluster size based on a marginal model and investigate their asymptotic properties. One is an extension of Cong et al. (2007) to interval-censored data and the other uses the within-cluster resampling method proposed by Hoffman et al. (2001). Simulation results imply that the proposed estimators have a better performance in terms of bias and coverage rate of true value than an estimator with no adjustment of informative cluster size when the cluster size is related with survival time. Finally, they are applied to lymphatic filariasis data adopted from Williamson et al. (2008).

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.689-696
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• 2010

Interval-censored data are commonly found in studies of diseases that progress without symptoms, which require clinical evaluation for detection. Several techniques have been suggested with independent assumption. However, the assumption will not be valid if observations come from clusters. Furthermore, when the cluster size relates to response variables, commonly used methods can bring biased results. For example, in a study on lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease where worms make several nests in the infected person's lymphatic vessels and reside until adulthood, the response variable of interest is the nest-extinction times. Since the extinction times of nests are checked by repeated ultrasound examinations, exact extinction times are not observed. Instead, data are composed of two examination points: the last examination time with living worms and the first examination time with dead worms. Furthermore, as Williamson et al. (2008) pointed out, larger nests show a tendency for low clearance rates. This association has been denoted as an informative cluster size. To analyze the relationship between the numbers of nests and interval-censored nest-extinction times, this study proposes a joint model for the relationship between cluster size and clustered interval-censored failure data.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.707-718
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• 2012

We propose a semi-parametric model to analyze clustered and interval-censored data; in addition, we plugged-in a gamma frailty to the model to measure the association of members within the same cluster. We propose an estimation procedure based on EM algorithm. Simulation results showed that our estimation procedure may result in unbiased estimates. The standard error is smaller than expected and provides conservative results to estimate the coverage rate; however, this trend gradually disappeared as the number of members in the same cluster increased. In addition, our proposed method was illustrated with data taken from diabetic retinopathy studies to evaluate the effectiveness of laser photocoagulation in delaying or preventing the onset of blindness in individuals with diabetic retinopathy.