Semiparametric Cure Regression Models with Informative Case K Interval-Censored Failure Time Data

Abstract

Interval-censored failure time data occur in many areas and many methods for their analyses have been proposed.In particular, some methods have been developed for the situation with the existence of a cured subgroup or informative censoring.In this paper, we discuss the case where both a cured subgroup and informative censoring exist and a frailty-based semiparametric non-mixture cure model approach is proposed.For inference, a two-step estimation procedure is developed and the resulting estimators of regression parameters are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal.An extensive simulation study is conducted and indicates that the proposed procedure works well in practice.In addition, the methodology is applied to a set of real data arising from an Alzheimer's disease study.