4,020 research outputs found
A review on competing risks methods for survival analysis
When modelling competing risks survival data, several techniques have been
proposed in both the statistical and machine learning literature.
State-of-the-art methods have extended classical approaches with more flexible
assumptions that can improve predictive performance, allow high dimensional
data and missing values, among others. Despite this, modern approaches have not
been widely employed in applied settings. This article aims to aid the uptake
of such methods by providing a condensed compendium of competing risks survival
methods with a unified notation and interpretation across approaches. We
highlight available software and, when possible, demonstrate their usage via
reproducible R vignettes. Moreover, we discuss two major concerns that can
affect benchmark studies in this context: the choice of performance metrics and
reproducibility.Comment: 22 pages, 2 table
Hierarchical models for semi-competing risks data with application to quality of end-of-life care for pancreatic cancer
Readmission following discharge from an initial hospitalization is a key
marker of quality of health care in the United States. For the most part,
readmission has been used to study quality of care for patients with acute
health conditions, such as pneumonia and heart failure, with analyses typically
based on a logistic-Normal generalized linear mixed model. Applying this model
to the study readmission among patients with increasingly prevalent advanced
health conditions such as pancreatic cancer is problematic, however, because it
ignores death as a competing risk. A more appropriate analysis is to imbed such
studies within the semi-competing risks framework. To our knowledge, however,
no comprehensive statistical methods have been developed for cluster-correlated
semi-competing risks data. In this paper we propose a novel hierarchical
modeling framework for the analysis of cluster-correlated semi-competing risks
data. The framework permits parametric or non-parametric specifications for a
range of model components, including baseline hazard functions and
distributions for key random effects, giving analysts substantial flexibility
as they consider their own analyses. Estimation and inference is performed
within the Bayesian paradigm since it facilitates the straightforward
characterization of (posterior) uncertainty for all model parameters including
hospital-specific random effects. The proposed framework is used to study the
risk of readmission among 5,298 Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer at 112 hospitals in the six New England states between
2000-2009, specifically to investigate the role of patient-level risk factors
and to characterize variation in risk across hospitals that is not explained by
differences in patient case-mix
The Bernstein-Von Mises Theorem in Semiparametric Competing Risks Models
Semiparametric Bayesian models are nowadays a popular tool in survival analysis. An important area of research concerns the investigation of frequentist properties of these models. In this paper, a Bernstein-von Mises theorem is derived for semiparametric Bayesian models of competing risks data. The cause-specific hazard is taken as the product of the conditional probability of a failure type and the overall hazard rate. We model the conditional probability as a smooth function of time and leave the cumulative overall hazard unspecified. A prior distribution is defined on the joint parameter space, which includes a beta process prior for the cumulative overall hazard. We show that the posterior distribution for any differentiable functional of interest is asymptotically equivalent to the sampling distribution derived from maximum likelihood estimation. A simulation study is provided to illustrate the coverage properties of credible intervals on cumulative incidence functions.Bayesian nonparametrics, Bernstein-von Mises theorem, beta process, competing risks, conditional probability of a failure type, semiparametric inference.
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