Abstract
When dealing with multivariate survival data, featuring the association structure is a key difference from the univariate survival analysis. In this paper, we explore to use the composite likelihood framework to handle multivariate survival data, where only the lower dimensional survival distributions need to be specified. The development allows us to use available modeling schemes for bivariate survival data to characterize association structures of correlated survival times. The inference procedure is based on the pseudolikelihood which is the product of the lower dimensional bivariate distributions. The proposed estimation procedure is assessed through simulation studies. As a genuine application, we apply the composite likelihood inference procedure to analyze the data from the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) study, where four types of PBDE congeners are available. The associations among the four PBDE congeners, and the relationships between the covariates and the PBDE congeners are of interest. The result shows that there is strong association among the concentrations of the four PBDE congeners, and statistically significant predictors on the concentrations of the four PBDE congeners are identified.
Highlights
A Composite Likelihood Method for the Analysis of Multivariate Survival DataReceived: December 3, 2018 Accepted: January 3, 2019 Online Published: January 14, 2019 doi:10.5539/ijsp.v8n2p23
Multivariate survival data arise in many settings where the association among times to events is a key difference from standard univariaete survival data
In marginal analysis (e.g., Wei, Lin and Weissfeld, 1989), the association among the survival times is ignored with the focus on deriving the point estimates of the marginal model parameters, and the sandwich type variance estimator is invoked to incorporate the ignorance of modeling the association structure
Summary
Received: December 3, 2018 Accepted: January 3, 2019 Online Published: January 14, 2019 doi:10.5539/ijsp.v8n2p23
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