Estimation of partly linear additive hazards model with left-truncated and right-censored data

Abstract

In this article, we consider an additive hazards semiparametric model for left-truncated and right-censored data where the risk function has a partly linear structure, we call it the partly linear additive hazards model. The nonlinear components are assumed to be B-splines functions, so the model can be viewed as a semiparametric model with an unknown baseline hazard function and a partly linear parametric risk function, which can model both linear and nonlinear covariate effects, hence is more flexible than a purely linear or nonlinear model. We construct a pseudo-score function to estimate the coefficients of the linear covariates and the B-spline basis functions. The proposed estimators are asymptotically normal under the assumption that the true nonlinear functions are B-spline functions whose knot locations and number of knots are held fixed. On the other hand, when the risk functions are unknown non-parametric functions, the proposed method provides a practical solution to the underlying inference problems. We conduct simulation studies to empirically examine the finite-sample performance of the proposed method and analyze a real dataset for illustration.