• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.931-940
• /
• 2013

For analysis of clustered survival data, the inferences of parameters in semi-parametric frailty models have been widely studied. It is also important to investigate the potential heterogeneity in event times among clusters (e.g. centers, patients). For purpose of this analysis, the interval estimation of frailty is useful. In this paper we propose a visualizing method to present confidence intervals of individual frailties across clusters using the frailtyHL R-package, which is implemented from h-likelihood methods for frailty models. The proposed method is demonstrated using two practical examples.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
• /
• v.28 no.5
• /
• pp.965-976
• /
• 2015

Determining relevant variables for a regression model is important in regression analysis. Recently, a variable selection methods using a penalized likelihood with various penalty functions (e.g. LASSO and SCAD) have been widely studied in simple statistical models such as linear models and generalized linear models. The advantage of these methods is that they select important variables and estimate regression coefficients, simultaneously; therefore, they delete insignificant variables by estimating their coefficients as zero. We study how to select proper variables based on penalized hierarchical likelihood (HL) in semi-parametric frailty models that allow three penalty functions, LASSO, SCAD and HL. For the variable selection we develop a new function in the "frailtyHL" R package. Our methods are illustrated with breast cancer survival data from the Medical Center at Chonnam National University in Korea. We compare the results from three variable-selection methods and discuss advantages and disadvantages.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
• /
• v.27 no.2
• /
• pp.499-510
• /
• 2016

It is very important to select relevant variables in regression models for survival analysis. In this paper, we introduce a penalized variable-selection procedure in multi-level frailty models based on the "frailtyHL" R package (Ha et al., 2012). Here, the estimation procedure of models is based on the penalized hierarchical likelihood, and three penalty functions (LASSO, SCAD and HL) are considered. The proposed methods are illustrated with multi-country/multi-center bladder cancer survival data from the EORTC in Belgium. We compare the results of three variable-selection methods and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, the results of data analysis showed that the SCAD and HL methods select well important variables than in the LASSO method.