Longitudinal biomarkers such as patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and quality of life (QOL) are routinely collected in cancer clinical trials or other studies. Joint modeling of PRO/QOL and survival data can provide a comparative assessment of patient-reported changes in specific symptoms or global measures that correspond to changes in survival. Motivated by a head and neck cancer clinical trial, we develop a class of trajectory-based models for longitudinal and survival data with disease progression. Specifically, we propose a class of mixed effects regression models for longitudinal measures, a cure rate model for the disease progression time (T P ), and a Cox proportional hazards model with time-varying covariates for the overall survival time (T D ) to account for T P and treatment switching. Under the semi-competing risks framework, the disease progression is the nonterminal event, the occurrence of which is subject to a terminal event of death. The properties of the proposed models are examined in detail. Within the Bayesian paradigm, we derive the decompositions of the deviance information criterion (DIC) and the logarithm of the pseudo marginal likelihood (LPML) to assess the fit of the longitudinal component of the model and the fit of each survival component, separately. We further develop ΔDIC as well as ΔLPML to determine the importance and contribution of the longitudinal data to the model fit of the T P and T D data.
This research is motivated from the data from a large Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT). The prostate specific antigens (PSAs) were collected longitudinally, and the survival endpoint was the time to low-grade cancer or the time to high-grade cancer (competing risks). In this article, the goal is to model the longitudinal PSA data and the time-to-prostate cancer (PC) due to low- or high-grade. We consider the low-grade and high-grade as two competing causes of developing PC. A joint model for simultaneously analysing longitudinal and time-to-event data in the presence of multiple causes of failure (or competing risk) is proposed within the Bayesian framework. The proposed model allows for handling the missing causes of failure in the SELECT data and implementing an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution via a novel reparameterization technique. Bayesian criteria, ΔDICSurv, and ΔWAICSurv, are introduced to quantify the gain in fit in the survival sub-model due to the inclusion of longitudinal data. A simulation study is conducted to examine the empirical performance of the posterior estimates as well as ΔDICSurv and ΔWAICSurv and a detailed analysis of the SELECT data is also carried out to further demonstrate the proposed methodology.
We propose and estimate an alternating renewal model describing the propagation of anomalies in a backbone internet network in the United States. Internet anomalies, either caused by equipment malfunction, news events or malicious attacks, have been a focus of research in network engineering since the advent of the internet over 30 years ago. This article contributes to the understanding of statistical properties of the times between the arrivals of the anomalies, their duration and stochastic structure. Anomalous, or active, time periods are modelled as periods containing clusters or 1s, where 1 indicates a presence of an anomaly. The inactive periods consisting entirely of 0s dominate the 0–1 time series in every link. Since the active periods contain 0s, a separation parameter is introduced and estimated jointly with all other parameters of the model. Our statistical analysis shows that the integer-valued separation parameter and five other non-negative, scalar parameters satisfactorily describe all statistical properties of the observed 0–1 series.
We propose and estimate an alternating renewal model describing the propagation of anomalies in a backbone internet network in the United States. Internet anomalies, either caused by equipment malfunction, news events or malicious attacks, have been a focus of research in network engineering since the advent of the internet over 30 years ago. This article contributes to the understanding of statistical properties of the times between the arrivals of the anomalies, their duration and stochastic structure. Anomalous, or active, time periods are modelled as periods containing clusters or 1s, where 1 indicates a presence of an anomaly. The inactive periods consisting entirely of 0s dominate the 0–1 time series in every link. Since the active periods contain 0s, a separation parameter is introduced and estimated jointly with all other parameters of the model. Our statistical analysis shows that the integer-valued separation parameter and five other non-negative, scalar parameters satisfactorily describe all statistical properties of the observed 0–1 series.