Regression analysis of interval-censored failure time data with time-dependent covariates

Abstract

Interval-censored failure time data often occur in many areas and their analysis has recently attracted a great deal of attention. On the other hand, most of the existing literature for them can only deal with time-independent covariates. Sometimes one may face time dependent covariates and furthermore the covariates could also suffer measurement errors. For the situation, one approach is to conduct a joint analysis for which many methods have been developed in the literature under various framework. One drawback of these methods is that they usually assume that there are no more measurements on the covariates after the failure time and it is apparent that this may not be true. In this paper, a new joint analysis approach is proposed that can take into account the extra observations. In particular, for estimation, a MCEM algorithm is developed that is much more stable and converges much faster than the existing algorithms. To assess the finite sample performance of the proposed method, an extensive simulation study is conducted and suggests that it works well for practical situations. Also the method is applied to an AIDS study that motivated this investigation.