Locally efficient estimation of regression parameters using current status data

In biostatistics applications interest often focuses on the estimation of the distribution of a time-variable T. If one only observes whether or not T exceeds an observed monitoring time C, then the data structure is called current status data, also known as interval censored data, case I. We consider this data structure extended to allow the presence of both time-independent covariates and time-dependent covariate processes that are observed until the monitoring time. We assume that the monitoring process satisfies coarsening at random.Our goal is to estimate the regression parameter β of the regression model T=Zβ+ε. The curse of dimensionality implies no globally efficient nonparametric estimator with good practical performance at moderate sample sizes exists. We present an estimator of the parameter β that attains the semiparametric efficiency bound if we correctly specify (a) a model for the monitoring mechanism and (b) a lower-dimensional model for the conditional distribution of T given the covariates. In addition, our estimator is robust to model misspecification. If only (a) is correctly specified, the estimator remains consistent and asymptotically normal. We conclude with a simulation experiment and a data analysis.     

Efficient estimation for semiparametric varying- coefficient partially linear regression models with current status data

This article considers a semiparametric varying-coefficient partially linear regression model with current status data. The semiparametric varying-coefficient partially linear regression model which is a generalization of the partially linear regression model and varying-coefficient regression model that allows one to explore the possibly nonlinear effect of a certain covariate on the response variable. A Sieve maximum likelihood estimation method is proposed and the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are discussed. Under some mild conditions, the estimators are shown to be strongly consistent. The convergence rate of the estimator for the unknown smooth function is obtained and the estimator for the unknown parameter is shown to be asymptotically efficient and normally distributed. Simulation studies are conducted to examine the small-sample properties of the proposed estimates and a real dataset is used to illustrate our approach.     

Efficient estimation for additive hazards regression with bivariate current status data

This paper discusses efficient estimation for the additive hazards regression model when only bi- variate current status data are available.Current status data occur in many fields including demographical studies and tumorigenicity experiments (Keiding,1991;Sun,2006) and several approaches have been proposed for the additive hazards model with univariate current status data (Lin et al.,1998;Martinussen and Scheike,2002).For bivariate data,in addition to facing the same problems as those with univariate data,one needs to deal with the association or correlation between two related failure time variables of interest.For this,we employ the copula model and an efficient estimation procedure is developed for inference.Simulation studies are performed to evaluate the proposed estimates and suggest that the approach works well in practical situations.An illustrative example is provided.