Modelling the Survival of Western Honey Bee Apis mellifera and the African Stingless Bee Meliponula ferruginea Using Semiparametric Marginal Proportional Hazards Mixture Cure Model

Classical survival analysis assumes all subjects will experience the event of interest, but in some cases, a portion of the population may never encounter the event. These survival methods further assume independent survival times, which is not valid for honey bees, which live in nests. The study introduces a semi-parametric marginal proportional hazards mixture cure (PHMC) model with exchangeable correlation structure, using generalized estimating equations for survival data analysis. The model was tested on clustered right-censored bees survival data with a cured fraction, where two bee species were subjected to different entomopathogens to test the effect of the entomopathogens on the survival of the bee species. The Expectation-Solution algorithm is used to estimate the parameters. The study notes a weak positive association between cure statuses (ρ1=0.0007) and survival times for uncured bees (ρ2=0.0890), emphasizing their importance. The odds of being uncured for A. mellifera is higher than the odds for species M. ferruginea. The bee species, A. mellifera are more susceptible to entomopathogens icipe 7, icipe 20, and icipe 69. The Cox-Snell residuals show that the proposed semiparametric PH model generally fits the data well as compared to model that assume independent correlation structure. Thus, the semi parametric marginal proportional hazards mixture cure is parsimonious model for correlated bees survival data.

Survivals after liver transplantation for hepatocellular carcinoma:Granular data for a better allocation process?

To the Editor:A large international study has been recently published focusing on the combination of morphological aspects and alpha-fetoprotein(AFP)as predictors of survival in patients with hepatocellular cancer(HCC)treated with liver transplantation(LT)[1].As a matter of fact,morphology and biology represent the two sides of the same

Regression Analysis for the Additive Hazards Model with General Biased Survival Data

In survival analysis,data are frequently collected by some complex sampling schemes,e.g.,length biased sampling,case-cohort sampling and so on.In this paper,we consider the additive hazards model for the general biased survival data.A simple and unified estimating equation method is developed to estimate the regression parameters and baseline hazard function.The asymptotic properties of the resulting estimators are also derived.Furthermore,to check the adequacy of the fitted model with general biased survival data,we present a test statistic based on the cumulative sum of the martingale-type residuals.Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed methods,and applications to the shrub and Welsh Nickel Refiners datasets are given to illustrate the methodology.

Feature Screening for High-Dimensional Survival Data via Censored Quantile Correlation

This paper proposes a new sure independence screening procedure for high-dimensional survival data based on censored quantile correlation(CQC).This framework has two distinctive features:1)Via incorporating a weighting scheme,our metric is a natural extension of quantile correlation(QC),considered by Li(2015),to handle high-dimensional survival data;2)The proposed method not only is robust against outliers,but also can discover the nonlinear relationship between independent variables and censored dependent variable.Additionally,the proposed method enjoys the sure screening property under certain technical conditions.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method performs competitively on survival datasets of high-dimensional predictors.

A Class of Weighted Estimators for Additive Hazards Model in Case-cohort Studies

Case-cohort sampling is a commonly used and efficient method for studying large cohorts. In many situations, some covariates are easily measured on all cohort subjects, and surrogate measurements of the expensive covariates also may be observed. In this paper, to make full use of the covariate data collected outside the case-cohort sample, we propose＇a class of weighted estimators with general time-varying weights for the additive hazards model, and the estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. We also identify the estimator within this class that maximizes efficiency, and simulation studies show that the efficiency gains of the proposed estimator over the existing ones can be substantial in practical situations. A real example is provided.

Adjusted Log-rank Test with Double Inverse Weighting under Dependent Censoring

It is a common issue to compare treatment-specific survival and the weighted log-rank test is the most popular method for group comparison. However, in observational studies, treatments and censoring times are usually not independent, which invalidates the weighted log-rank tests. In this paper, we propose adjusted weighted log-rank tests in the presence of non-random treatment assignment and dependent censoring. A double-inverse weighted technique is developed to adjust the weighted log-rank tests. Specifically, inverse probabilities of treatment and censoring weighting are involved to balance the baseline treatment assignment and to overcome dependent censoring, respectively. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the proposed adjusted tests under the null hypothesis, and propose a method to obtain the critical values. Simulation studies show that the adjusted log-rank tests have correct sizes whereas the traditional weighted log-rank tests may fail in the presence of non-random treatment assignment and dependent censoring. An application to oropharyngeal carcinoma data from the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group is provided for illustration.

Case-cohort Analysis with General Additive-multiplicative Hazard Models

The case-cohort design is widely used in large epidemiological studms and prevention trials for cost reduction. In such a design, covariates are assembled only for a subcohort which is a random subset of the entire cohort and any additional cases outside the subcohort. In this paper, we discuss the case-cohort analysis with a class of general additive-multiplicative hazard models which includes the commonly used Cox model and additive hazard model as special cases. Two sampling schemes for the subcohort, Bernoulli sampling with arbitrary selection probabilities and stratified simple random sampling with fixed subcohort sizes, are discussed. In each setting, an estimating function is constructed to estimate the regression parameters. The resulting estimator is shown to be consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. The limiting variance-covariance matrix can be consistently estimated by the case-cohort data. A simulation study is conducted to assess the finite sample performances of the proposed method and a real example is provided.

Estimating Cumulative Treatment Effect Under an Additive Hazards Model

In clinical and epidemiologic studies of time to event,the treatment effect is often of direct interest,and the treatment effect is not constant over time.In this paper,the authors propose an estimator for the cumulative hazard difference under a stratified additive hazards model.The asymptotic properties of the resulting estimator are established,and the finite-sample properties are examined through simulation studies.An application to a liver cirrhosis data set from the Copenhagen Study Group for Liver Diseases is provided.