Cai Jianwen

Department of Biostatistics

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


Marginal Hazard Models with Varying-coefficients for Multivariate Failure Time Data

Statistical inference for the marginal hazard models with varying-coefficients for multivariate failure time data is studied. A local pseudo-partial likelihood procedure is proposed for estimating the unknown coefficients and the intercept function. A weighted average estimator is also proposed in an attempt to improve the efficiency of the estimator. The consistency and the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators are established and the standard error formulas for the estimated coefficients are derived and empirically tested. To reduce the computational burden of the maximum local pseudo-partial likelihood estimator, a simple and useful one-step estimator is proposed. Statistical properties of one-step estimator is established and simulation studies are conducted to compare the performance of the one-step estimator to the maximum local pseudo-partial likelihood estimator. The results show that the one-step estimator can save computational cost without deteriorating its performance both asymptotically and empirically. A data set from the Busselton Population Health Surveys is analyzed to illustrate our proposed methodology.


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