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Semiparametric accelerated failure time model for length-biased data with application to dementia study. (English) Zbl 1285.62119

Summary: A semiparametric accelerated failure time (AFT) model is proposed to evaluate the effects of risk factors on the unbiased failure times for the target population given the observed length-biased data. The analysis of length-biased data is complicated by informative right censoring due to the biased sampling mechanism, and consequently the techniques for conventional survival analysis are not applicable. We propose estimating equation methods for estimation and show the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators. The small sample performance of the estimating methods are investigated and compared with that of existing methods under various underlying distributions and censoring mechanisms. We apply the proposed model and estimating methods to a prevalent cohort study, the Canadian Study of Health and Aging (CSHA), to evaluate the survival duration according to diagnosis of subtype of dementia.

MSC:

62N05 Reliability and life testing
62N01 Censored data models
62G05 Nonparametric estimation
62P10 Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis
62N02 Estimation in survival analysis and censored data
62G20 Asymptotic properties of nonparametric inference