Lifetime Data Analysis最新文献

The proportional hazards mixture cure model is a popular analysis method for survival data where a subgroup of patients are cured. When the data are interval-censored, the estimation of this model is challenging due to its complex data structure. In this article, we propose a computationally efficient semiparametric Bayesian approach, facilitated by spline approximation and Poisson data augmentation, for model estimation and inference with interval-censored data and a cure rate. The spline approximation and Poisson data augmentation greatly simplify the MCMC algorithm and enhance the convergence of the MCMC chains. The empirical properties of the proposed method are examined through extensive simulation studies and also compared with the R package "GORCure". The use of the proposed method is illustrated through analyzing a data set from the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study.

In a semi-competing risks model in which a terminal event censors a non-terminal event but not vice versa, the conventional method can predict clinical outcomes by maximizing likelihood estimation. However, this method can produce unreliable or biased estimators when the number of events in the datasets is small. Specifically, parameter estimates may converge to infinity, or their standard errors can be very large. Moreover, terminal and non-terminal event times may be correlated, which can account for the frailty term. Here, we adapt the penalized likelihood with Firth's correction method for gamma frailty models with semi-competing risks data to reduce the bias caused by rare events. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of relative bias, mean squared error, standard error, and standard deviation compared to the conventional methods through simulation studies. The results of the proposed method are stable and robust even when data contain only a few events with the misspecification of the baseline hazard function. We also illustrate a real example with a multi-centre, patient-based cohort study to identify risk factors for chronic kidney disease progression or adverse clinical outcomes. This study will provide a better understanding of semi-competing risk data in which the number of specific diseases or events of interest is rare.

In clinical studies, one often encounters time-to-event data that are subject to right censoring and for which a fraction of the patients under study never experience the event of interest. Such data can be modeled using cure models in survival analysis. In the presence of cure fraction, the mixture cure model is popular, since it allows to model probability to be cured (called the incidence) and the survival function of the uncured individuals (called the latency). In this paper, we develop a variable selection procedure for the incidence and latency parts of a mixture cure model, consisting of a logistic model for the incidence and a semiparametric accelerated failure time model for the latency. We use a penalized likelihood approach, based on adaptive LASSO penalties for each part of the model, and we consider two algorithms for optimizing the criterion function. Extensive simulations are carried out to assess the accuracy of the proposed selection procedure. Finally, we employ the proposed method to a real dataset regarding heart failure patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction.

It is known that the hazard ratio lacks a useful causal interpretation. Even for data from a randomized controlled trial, the hazard ratio suffers from so-called built-in selection bias as, over time, the individuals at risk among the exposed and unexposed are no longer exchangeable. In this paper, we formalize how the expectation of the observed hazard ratio evolves and deviates from the causal effect of interest in the presence of heterogeneity of the hazard rate of unexposed individuals (frailty) and heterogeneity in effect (individual modification). For the case of effect heterogeneity, we define the causal hazard ratio. We show that the expected observed hazard ratio equals the ratio of expectations of the latent variables (frailty and modifier) conditionally on survival in the world with and without exposure, respectively. Examples with gamma, inverse Gaussian and compound Poisson distributed frailty and categorical (harming, beneficial or neutral) distributed effect modifiers are presented for illustration. This set of examples shows that an observed hazard ratio with a particular value can arise for all values of the causal hazard ratio. Therefore, the hazard ratio cannot be used as a measure of the causal effect without making untestable assumptions, stressing the importance of using more appropriate estimands, such as contrasts of the survival probabilities.

This paper studies a novel model averaging estimation issue for linear regression models when the responses are right censored and the covariates are measured with error. A novel weighted Mallows-type criterion is proposed for the considered issue by introducing multiple candidate models. The weight vector for model averaging is selected by minimizing the proposed criterion. Under some regularity conditions, the asymptotic optimality of the selected weight vector is established in terms of its ability to achieve the lowest squared loss asymptotically. Simulation results show that the proposed method is superior to the other existing related methods. A real data example is provided to supplement the actual performance.

Hazard ratios are prone to selection bias, compromising their use as causal estimands. On the other hand, if Aalen’s additive hazard model applies, the hazard difference has been shown to remain unaffected by the selection of frailty factors over time. Then, in the absence of confounding, observed hazard differences are equal in expectation to the causal hazard differences. However, in the presence of effect (on the hazard) heterogeneity, the observed hazard difference is also affected by selection of survivors. In this work, we formalize how the observed hazard difference (from a randomized controlled trial) evolves by selecting favourable levels of effect modifiers in the exposed group and thus deviates from the causal effect of interest. Such selection may result in a non-linear integrated hazard difference curve even when the individual causal effects are time-invariant. Therefore, a homogeneous time-varying causal additive effect on the hazard cannot be distinguished from a time-invariant but heterogeneous causal effect. We illustrate this causal issue by studying the effect of chemotherapy on the survival time of patients suffering from carcinoma of the oropharynx using data from a clinical trial. The hazard difference can thus not be used as an appropriate measure of the causal effect without making untestable assumptions.

This paper presents a semi-parametric modeling technique for estimating the survival function from a set of right-censored time-to-event data. Our method, named pseudo-value regression trees (PRT), is based on the pseudo-value regression framework, modeling individual-specific survival probabilities by computing pseudo-values and relating them to a set of covariates. The standard approach to pseudo-value regression is to fit a main-effects model using generalized estimating equations (GEE). PRT extend this approach by building a multivariate regression tree with pseudo-value outcome and by successively fitting a set of regularized additive models to the data in the nodes of the tree. Due to the combination of tree learning and additive modeling, PRT are able to perform variable selection and to identify relevant interactions between the covariates, thereby addressing several limitations of the standard GEE approach. In addition, PRT include time-dependent effects in the node-wise models. Interpretability of the PRT fits is ensured by controlling the tree depth. Based on the results of two simulation studies, we investigate the properties of the PRT method and compare it to several alternative modeling techniques. Furthermore, we illustrate PRT by analyzing survival in 3,652 patients enrolled for a randomized study on primary invasive breast cancer.

To achieve the goal of providing the best possible care to each individual under their care, physicians need to customize treatments for individuals with the same health state, especially when treating diseases that can progress further and require additional treatments, such as cancer. Making decisions at multiple stages as a disease progresses can be formalized as a dynamic treatment regime (DTR). Most of the existing optimization approaches for estimating dynamic treatment regimes including the popular method of Q-learning were developed in a frequentist context. Recently, a general Bayesian machine learning framework that facilitates using Bayesian regression modeling to optimize DTRs has been proposed. In this article, we adapt this approach to censored outcomes using Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) for each stage under the accelerated failure time modeling framework, along with simulation studies and a real data example that compare the proposed approach with Q-learning. We also develop an R wrapper function that utilizes a standard BART survival model to optimize DTRs for censored outcomes. The wrapper function can easily be extended to accommodate any type of Bayesian machine learning model.

Many research questions concern treatment effects on outcomes that can recur several times in the same individual. For example, medical researchers are interested in treatment effects on hospitalizations in heart failure patients and sports injuries in athletes. Competing events, such as death, complicate causal inference in studies of recurrent events because once a competing event occurs, an individual cannot have more recurrent events. Several statistical estimands have been studied in recurrent event settings, with and without competing events. However, the causal interpretations of these estimands, and the conditions that are required to identify these estimands from observed data, have yet to be formalized. Here we use a formal framework for causal inference to formulate several causal estimands in recurrent event settings, with and without competing events. When competing events exist, we clarify when commonly used classical statistical estimands can be interpreted as causal quantities from the causal mediation literature, such as (controlled) direct effects and total effects. Furthermore, we show that recent results on interventionist mediation estimands allow us to define new causal estimands with recurrent and competing events that may be of particular clinical relevance in many subject matter settings. We use causal directed acyclic graphs and single world intervention graphs to illustrate how to reason about identification conditions for the various causal estimands based on subject matter knowledge. Furthermore, using results on counting processes, we show that our causal estimands and their identification conditions, which are articulated in discrete time, converge to classical continuous time counterparts in the limit of fine discretizations of time. We propose estimators and establish their consistency for the various identifying functionals. Finally, we use the proposed estimators to compute the effect of blood pressure lowering treatment on the recurrence of acute kidney injury using data from the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial.

Survival causal effect estimation based on right-censored data is of key interest in both survival analysis and causal inference. Propensity score weighting is one of the most popular methods in the literature. However, since it involves the inverse of propensity score estimates, its practical performance may be very unstable, especially when the covariate overlap is limited between treatment and control groups. To address this problem, a covariate balancing method is developed in this paper to estimate the counterfactual survival function. The proposed method is nonparametric and balances covariates in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) via weights that are counterparts of inverse propensity scores. The uniform rate of convergence for the proposed estimator is shown to be the same as that for the classical Kaplan-Meier estimator. The appealing practical performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by a simulation study as well as two real data applications to study the causal effect of smoking on survival time of stroke patients and that of endotoxin on survival time for female patients with lung cancer respectively.