Regression analysis of clustered interval-censored failure time data with informative cluster size

Abstract

Correlated or clustered failure time data often occur in medical studies, among other fields ( Cai and Prentice, 1995; Kalbfleisch and Prentice, 2002), and sometimes such data arise together with interval censoring ( Wang et al., 2006). Furthermore, the failure time of interest may be related to the cluster size. For example, Williamson et al. (2008) discussed such an example arising from a lymphatic filariasis study. A simple and common approach to the analysis of these data is to simplify or convert interval-censored data to right-censored data due to the lack of proper inference procedures for direct analysis of these data. In this paper, two procedures are presented for regression analysis of clustered failure time data that allow both interval censoring and informative cluster size. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the presented approaches and they are applied to a motivating example.