Regression with incomplete covariates and left-truncated time-to-event data
Abstract
Studies of chronic diseases routinely sample individuals subject to conditions on an event time of
interest. In epidemiology, for example, prevalent cohort studies aiming to evaluate risk factors for
survival following onset of dementia require subjects to have survived to the point of screening. In
clinical trials designed to assess the effect of experimental cancer treatments on survival, patients
are required to survive from the time of cancer diagnosis to recruitment. Such conditions yield
samples featuring left-truncated event time distributions. Incomplete covariate data often arise
in such settings, but standard methods do not deal with the fact that individuals’ covariate distributions
are also affected by left truncation. We describe an expectation-maximization algorithm
for dealing with incomplete covariate data in such settings, which uses the covariate distribution
conditional on the selection criterion. We describe an extension to deal with subgroup analyses in
clinical trials for the case in which the stratification variable is incompletely observed.
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Cite this version of the work
Hua Shen, Richard J. Cook
(2013).
Regression with incomplete covariates and left-truncated time-to-event data. UWSpace.
http://hdl.handle.net/10012/10293
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