An optimal dynamic treatment regime (DTR) consists of a sequence of decision rules in maximizing long-term benefits, which is applicable for chronic diseases such as HIV infection or cancer. In this paper, we develop a novel angle-based approach to search the optimal DTR under a multicategory treatment framework for survival data. The proposed method targets maximization the conditional survival function of patients following a DTR. In contrast to most existing approaches which are designed to maximize the expected survival time under a binary treatment framework, the proposed method solves the multicategory treatment problem given multiple stages for censored data. Specifically, the proposed method obtains the optimal DTR via integrating estimations of decision rules at multiple stages into a single multicategory classification algorithm without imposing additional constraints, which is also more computationally efficient and robust. In theory, we establish Fisher consistency of the proposed method under regularity conditions. Our numerical studies show that the proposed method outperforms competing methods in terms of maximizing the conditional survival function. We apply the proposed method to two real datasets: Framingham heart study data and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) clinical data.
This paper focuses on quantifying and estimating the predictive accuracy of prognostic models for time-to-event outcomes with competing events. We consider the time-dependent discrimination and calibration metrics, including the receiver operating characteristics curve and the Brier score, in the context of competing risks. To address censoring, we propose a unified nonparametric estimation framework for both discrimination and calibration measures, by weighting the censored subjects with the conditional probability of the event of interest given the observed data. We demonstrate through simul…
Estimating individualized treatment rules is a central task for personalized medicine. [zhao2012estimating] and [zhang2012robust] proposed outcome weighted learning to estimate individualized treatment rules directly through maximizing the expected outcome without modeling the response directly. In this paper, we extend the outcome weighted learning to right censored survival data without requiring either an inverse probability of censoring weighting or a semiparametric modeling of the censoring and failure times as done in [zhao2015doubly]. To accomplish this, we take advantage of the tree ba…
Flexibility in shape and scale of Burr XII distribution can make close approximation of numerous well-known probability density functions. Due to these capabilities, the usages of Burr XII distribution are applied in risk analysis, lifetime data analysis and process capability estimation. In this paper the Cross-Entropy (CE) method is further developed in terms of Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to estimate the parameters of Burr XII distribution for the complete data or in the presence of multiple censoring. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the MLE by means o…
CensSpatial is an R package for analyzing spatial censored data through linear models. It offers a set of tools for simulating, estimating, making predictions, and performing local influence diagnostics for outlier detection. The package provides four algorithms for estimation and prediction. One of them is based on the stochastic approximation of the EM (SAEM) algorithm, which allows easy and fast estimation of the parameters of linear spatial models when censoring is present. The package provides worthy measures to perform diagnostic analysis using the Hessian matrix of the completed log-lik…
We propose a novel approach for estimating mean survival time in the presence of censored data, in which we divide the population under study into survival-ordered fractions defined by a set of proportions, and compute the mean survival time for each fraction separately. Our approach provides a detailed picture of the distribution of the time variable while preserving the appealing interpretation of the mean. Our measure proves to be of great use in applications, particularly those where we are able to detect differences in mean survival across groups for certain fractions of the population th…
Multicategory Matched Learning for Estimating Optimal Individualized Treatment Rules in Observational Studies with Application to a Hepatocellular Carcinoma Study
Self-Consistent Equation-guided Neural Networks for Censored Time-to-Event Data
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute（哈佛朝圣者医疗保健研究所）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Harvard School of Public Health（哈佛公共卫生学院）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
This paper addresses the problem of estimating, in the presence of random censoring as well as competing risks, the extreme value index of the (sub)-distribution function associated to one particular cause, in the heavy-tail case. Asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator (which has the form of an Aalen-Johansen integral, and is the first estimator proposed in this context) is established. A small simulation study exhibits its performances for finite samples. Estimation of extreme quantiles of the cumulative incidence function is also addressed.
In medical studies, the collected covariates usually contain underlying outliers. For clustered /longitudinal data with censored observations, the traditional Gehan-type estimator is robust to outliers existing in response but sensitive to outliers in the covariate domain, and it also ignores the within-cluster correlations. To take account of within-cluster correlations, varying cluster sizes, and outliers in covariates, we propose weighted Gehan-type estimating functions for parameter estimation in the accelerated failure time model for clustered data. We provide the asymptotic properties of…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Analysis of random censored life-time data along with some related stochastic covariables is of great importance in many applied sciences like medical research, population studies and planning etc. The parametric estimation technique commonly used under this set-up is based on the efficient but non-robust likelihood approach. In this paper, we propose a robust parametric estimator for the censored data with stochastic covariates based on the minimum density power divergence approach. The resulting estimator also has competitive efficiency with respect to the maximum likelihood estimator under …
Discrimination performance in illness-death models with interval-censored disease data
Mathematical Institute, Leiden University（莱顿大学数学研究所）；Department of Biomedical Data Sciences, Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心生物医学数据科学系）；Trial and Data Center, Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology（公主玛克西玛儿童肿瘤中心试验与数据中心）
The proportional hazards (PH) model is arguably one of the most popular models used to analyze time to event data arising from clinical trials and longitudinal studies, among many others. In many such studies, the event time of interest is not directly observed but is known relative to periodic examination times; i.e., practitioners observe either current status or interval-censored data. The analysis of data of this structure is often fraught with many difficulties. Further exacerbating this issue, in some such studies the observed data also consists of instantaneous failures; i.e., the event…
On a penalised likelihood approach for joint modelling of longitudinal covariates and partly interval-censored data -- an application to the Anti-PD1 brain collaboration trial
We describe a new approach to estimating relative risks in time-to-event prediction problems with censored data in a fully parametric manner. Our approach does not require making strong assumptions of constant proportional hazard of the underlying survival distribution, as required by the Cox-proportional hazard model. By jointly learning deep nonlinear representations of the input covariates, we demonstrate the benefits of our approach when used to estimate survival risks through extensive experimentation on multiple real world datasets with different levels of censoring. We further demonstra…
This paper addresses the problem of estimating the extreme value index in presence of random censoring for distributions in the Weibull domain of attraction. The methodologies introduced in [Worms (2014)], in the heavy-tailed case, are adapted here to the negative extreme value index framework, leading to the definition of weighted versions of the popular moments of relative excesses with arbitrary exponent. This leads to the definition of two families of estimators (with an adaptation of the so called Moment estimator as a particular case), for which the consistency is proved under a first or…
The estimation of extreme flood quantiles is challenging due to the relative scarcity of extreme data compared to typical target return periods. Several approaches have been developed over the years to face this challenge, including regional estimation and the use of historical flood data. This paper investigates the combination of both approaches using a multivariate peaks-over-threshold model, that allows estimating altogether the intersite dependence structure and the marginal distributions at each site. The joint distribution of extremes at several sites is constructed using a semi-paramet…
Censored broken adaptive ridge rank regression via induced smoothing
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science, Sungshin Women’s University（成均馆大学数学、统计与数据科学学院）；Sungshin Women’s University（诚信女子大学）；Department of Biostatistics, Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学生物统计系）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）；Center for Data Science, Sungshin Women’s University（诚信女子大学数据科学中心）
We propose a new approach for estimating the parameters of a probability distribution. It consists on combining two new methods of estimation. The first is based on the definition of a new distance measuring the difference between variations of two distributions on a finite number of points from their support and on using this measure for estimation purposes by the method of minimum distance. For the second method, given an empirical discrete distribution, we build up an auxiliary discrete theoretical distribution having the same support of the first and depending on the same parameters of the…
Forest-based methods have recently gained in popularity for non-parametric treatment effect estimation. Building on this line of work, we introduce causal survival forests, which can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in a survival and observational setting where outcomes may be right-censored. Our approach relies on orthogonal estimating equations to robustly adjust for both censoring and selection effects under unconfoundedness. In our experiments, we find our approach to perform well relative to a number of baselines.
In this article, the estimation of reliability of a system is discussed $p(y<x)$ when strength, $X$, and stress, $Y$, are two independent exponential distribution with different scale parameters when the available data are type II Censored sample. Different methods for estimating the reliability are applied. The point estimators obtained are maximum likelihood estimator, uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator, and Bayesian estimators based on conjugate and non informative prior distributions. A comparison of the estimates obtained is performed. Interval estimators of the reliability are…
Most work in neural networks focuses on estimating the conditional mean of a continuous response variable given a set of covariates.In this article, we consider estimating the conditional distribution function using neural networks for both censored and uncensored data. The algorithm is built upon the data structure particularly constructed for the Cox regression with time-dependent covariates. Without imposing any model assumption, we consider a loss function that is based on the full likelihood where the conditional hazard function is the only unknown nonparametric parameter, for which uncon…
Current status data are commonly encountered in medical and epidemiological studies in which the failure time for study units is the outcome variable of interest. Data of this form are characterized by the fact that the failure time is not directly observed but rather is known relative to an observation time; i.e., the failure times are either left- or right-censored. Due to its structure, the analysis of such data can be challenging. To circumvent these challenges and to provide for a flexible modeling construct which can be used to analyze current status data, herein, a partially linear addi…
One goal in survival analysis of right-censored data is to estimate the marginal survival function in the presence of dependent censoring. When many auxiliary covariates are sufficient to explain the dependent censoring, estimation based on either a semiparametric model or a nonparametric model of the conditional survival function can be problematic due to the high dimensionality of the auxiliary information. In this paper, we use two working models to condense these high-dimensional covariates in dimension reduction; then an estimate of the marginal survival function can be derived nonparamet…
We propose a class of dimension reduction methods for right censored survival data using a counting process representation of the failure process. Semiparametric estimating equations are constructed to estimate the dimension reduction subspace for the failure time model. The proposed method addresses two fundamental limitations of existing approaches. First, using the counting process formulation, it does not require any estimation of the censoring distribution to compensate the bias in estimating the dimension reduction subspace. Second, the nonparametric part in the estimating equations is a…
Estimating conditional Mann-Whitney effects using pseudo-observation-based regression
Institute of Statistics and Mathematical Economics, RWTH Aachen University（统计与数理经济研究所，亚琛工业大学）；Institute for Medical Biometry, Informatics and Epidemiology, University of Bonn, University Hospital Bonn（波恩大学医学院生物统计学、信息学与流行病学研究所，波恩大学医院）
Best practices for estimating and reporting epidemiological delay distributions of infectious diseases using public health surveillance and healthcare data
Data with uncertain, missing, censored, and correlated values are commonplace in many research fields including astronomy. Unfortunately, such data are often treated in an ad hoc way in the astronomical literature potentially resulting in inconsistent parameter estimates. Furthermore, in a realistic setting, the variables of interest or their errors may have non-normal distributions which complicates the modeling. I present a novel approach to compute the likelihood function for such data sets. This approach employs Gaussian copulas to decouple the correlation structure of variables and their …
SurvHTE-Bench: A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation in Survival Analysis
Machine Learning Department & Heinz College Carnegie Mellon University（机器学习系及卡内基梅隆大学海因兹学院）；Heinz College Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学海因兹学院）；National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health（国家医学图书馆国立卫生研究院）
The problem of estimating censored linear regression models with autocorrelated errors arises in many environmental and social studies. The present work proposes a Bayesian approach to estimate censored regression models with AR(p) errors. The algorithm developed here considers the Gibbs sampler with data augmentation(GDA), in which, at each iteration, both the model parameters and the latent variables are sampled. The data augmentation is achieved from multiple sampling of the latent variables from the corresponding conditional distributions. A suitable variable transformation allows the full…
Bayesian generalized method of moments applied to pseudo-observations in survival analysis
Oncostat U1018, Inserm（Inserm）；University Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Ipsen Innovation, Clinical Development Organisation（益普生创新）；I-Biostat；KU-Leuven（荷语鲁汶大学）；Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science（统计学与精算学系）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG（罗氏制药）
An individualized treatment regime (ITR) is a decision rule that assigns treatments based on patients' characteristics. The value function of an ITR is the expected outcome in a counterfactual world had this ITR been implemented. Recently, there has been increasing interest in combining heterogeneous data sources, such as leveraging the complementary features of randomized controlled trial (RCT) data and a large observational study (OS). Usually, a covariate shift exists between the source and target population, rendering the source-optimal ITR unnecessarily optimal for the target population. …
Counterfactual Survival Q-learning via Buckley-James Boosting, with Applications to ACTG 175 and CALGB 8923
Division of Biostatistics, The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学生物统计学系）；Division of Science and Mathematics, University of Minnesota-Morris（明尼苏达州莫里斯大学科学与数学系）
