• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.22
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• pp.9673-9678
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• 2014

Background: Breast cancer is a fatal disease and the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women with an increasing pattern worldwide. The burden is mostly attributed to metastatic cancers that occur in one-third of patients and the treatments are palliative. It is of great interest to determine factors affecting time from cancer diagnosis to secondary metastasis. Materials and Methods: Cure rate models assume a Poisson distribution for the number of unobservable metastatic-component cells that are completely deleted from the non-metastasis patient body but some may remain and result in metastasis. Time to metastasis is defined as a function of the number of these cells and the time for each cell to develop a detectable sign of metastasis. Covariates are introduced to the model via the rate of metastatic-component cells. We used non-mixture cure rate models with Weibull and log-logistic distributions in a Bayesian setting to assess the relationship between metastasis free survival and covariates. Results: The median of metastasis free survival was 76.9 months. Various models showed that from covariates in the study, lymph node involvement ratio and being progesterone receptor positive were significant, with an adverse and a beneficial effect on metastasis free survival, respectively. The estimated fraction of patients cured from metastasis was almost 48%. The Weibull model had a slightly better performance than log-logistic. Conclusions: Cure rate models are popular in survival studies and outperform other models under certain conditions. We explored the prognostic factors of metastatic breast cancer from a different viewpoint. In this study, metastasis sites were analyzed all together. Conducting similar studies in a larger sample of cancer patients as well as evaluating the prognostic value of covariates in metastasis to each site separately are recommended.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.837-849
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• 2019

Latent class models (LCM) are useful tools to draw hidden information from categorical data. This model can also be interpreted as a mixture model with multinomial component distributions. In some cases, however, an available dataset may contain both categorical and count or continuous data. For such cases, we can extend the LCM to a mixture model with both multinomial and other component distributions such as normal and Poisson distributions. In this paper, we consider a LCM for the data containing categorical and count data to analyze the Drug Review dataset which contains categorical responses and text review. From this data analysis, we show that we can obtain more specific hidden inforamtion than those from the LCM only with categorical responses.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.5585-5593
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• 2014

This study tested the hypothesis that the significance of the heterogeneous dispersion parameter in safety performance function (SPF) used to estimate the expected crashes is affected by the endogenous heterogeneous prior distributions, and analyzed the impacts of the mis-specified dispersion parameter on the evaluation results for traffic safety countermeasures. In particular, this study simulated the Poisson means based on the heterogeneous dispersion parameters and estimated the SPFs using both the negative binomial (NB) model and the heterogeneous negative binomial (HNB) model for analyzing the impacts of the model mis-specification on the mean and dispersion functions in SPF. In addition, this study analyzed the characteristics of errors in the crash reduction factors (CRFs) obtained when the two models are used to estimate the posterior means and variances, which are essentially estimated through the estimated hyper-parameters in the heterogeneous prior distributions. The simulation study results showed that a mis-estimation on the heterogeneous dispersion parameters through the NB model does not affect the coefficient of the mean functions, but the variances of the prior distribution are seriously mis-estimated when the NB model is used to develop SPFs without considering the heterogeneity in dispersion. Consequently, when the NB model is used erroneously to estimate the prior distributions with heterogeneous dispersion parameters, the mis-estimated posterior mean can produce large errors in CRFs up to 120%.