Statistical Analysis of Bivariate Current Status Data with Informative Censoring Using Frailty Effects

Abstract

In animal tumorigenicity data, tumor onsets occur at several sites and onset times cannot be exactly observed. Instead, the existence of tumors is examined only at death time or sacrifice time of the animal. Such an incomplete data structure makes it difficult to investigate the effect of treatment on tumor onset times; in addition, such dependence should be considered when censoring due to death is related with tumor onset. A bivariate frailty effect is incorporated to model bivariate tumor onsets and to connect death with tumor. For the inference of parameters, EM algorithm is applied and a real NTP(National Toxicology Program) dataset is analyzed as an illustrative example.