Predicting Failure times for some Unobserved Events with Application to Real-Life Data

This study aims to predict failure times for some units in some lifetime experiments. In some practical situations, the experimenter may not be able to register the failure times of all units during the experiment. Recently, this situation can be described by a new type of censored data called multiply-hybrid censored data. In this paper, the linear failure rate distribution is well-fitted to some real-life data and hence some statistical inference approaches are applied to estimate the distribution parameters. A two-sample prediction approach applied to extrapolate a new sample simulates the observed data for predicting the failure times for the unobserved units

Maximum likelihood and pseudo score approaches for parametric time-to-event analysis with informative entry times

We develop a maximum likelihood estimating approach for time-to-event Weibull regression models with outcome-dependent sampling, where sampling of subjects is dependent on the residual fraction of the time left to developing the event of interest. Additionally, we propose a two-stage approach which proceeds by iteratively estimating, through a pseudo score, the Weibull parameters of interest (i.e., the regression parameters) conditional on the inverse probability of sampling weights; and then re-estimating these weights (given the updated Weibull parameter estimates) through the profiled full likelihood. With these two new methods, both the estimated sampling mechanism parameters and the Weibull parameters are consistently estimated under correct specification of the conditional referral distribution. Standard errors for the regression parameters are obtained directly from inverting the observed information matrix in the full likelihood specification and by either calculating bootstrap or robust standard errors for the hybrid pseudo score/profiled likelihood approach. Loss of efficiency with the latter approach is considered. Robustness of the proposed methods to misspecification of the referral mechanism and the time-to-event distribution is also briefly examined. Further, we show how to extend our methods to the family of parametric time-to-event distributions characterized by the generalized gamma distribution. The motivation for these two approaches came from data on time to cirrhosis from hepatitis C viral infection in patients referred to the Edinburgh liver clinic. We analyze these data here.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS725 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Forecasting Remission Time of a Treatment Method for Leukemia as an Application to Statistical Inference Approach

In this paper, Weibull-Linear Exponential distribution (WLED) has been investigated whether being it is a well - fit distribution to a clinical real data. These data represent the duration of remission achieved by a certain drug used in the treatment of leukemia for a group of patients. The statistical inference approach is used to estimate the parameters of the WLED through the set of the fitted data. The estimated parameters are utilized to evaluate the survival and hazard functions and hence assessing the treatment method through forecasting the duration of remission times of patients. A two-sample prediction approach has been applied to obtain a predictive sample based on the Bayes estimates of the parameters. The statistical inference approach is applied to the case of censored data namely Type-II hybrid censoring scheme, which is common in clinical studies