Semiparametric Analysis Of Case K Interval-Censored Failure Time Data In The Presence Of A Cured Subgroup And Informative Censoring

Interval censoring and the existence of a cured subgroup occur quite often in survival studies and many procedures have been developed for dealing with each of the two issues individually or them together. In this paper, we discuss the situation where both issues exist and furthermore, interval censoring may be informative, for which there exists relatively much less literature. For the problem, we present a frailty-based joint model approach in which a frailty term is employed to describe the correlation between the failure time of interest and the censoring mechanism. For inference, a two-step estimation procedure is developed and in particular, the sieve maximum-likelihood estimation approach is used for estimation of the unknown function. The proposed estimators of regression parameters are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal, and an extensive simulation study conducted suggests that the proposed procedure works well for practical situations. In addition, an application is provided.