Nonparametric tests for stratified additive hazards model based on current status data

Abstract

Stratified regression models are commonly employed when study subjects may come from possibly different strata such as different medical centers, and for the situation, one common question of interest is to test the existence of the stratum effect. To address this, there exists some literature on the testing of the stratum effects under the framework of the proportional hazards model when one observes right-censored data or interval-censored data. In this paper, we consider the situation under the additive hazards model when one faces current status data, for which there does not seem to exist an established test procedure. The asymptotic distributions of the proposed test procedure are provided. Also a simulation study is performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and indicates that it works well for practical situations. The approach is applied to a set of real current status data from a tumorigenicity study.