Testing independence of bivariate censored data using random walk on restricted permutation graph

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a procedure to test the independence of bivariate censored data, which is generic and applicable to any censoring types in the literature. To test the hypothesis, we consider a rank-based statistic, Kendall’s tau statistic. The censored data defines a restricted permutation space of all possible ranks of the observations. We propose the statistic, the average of Kendall’s tau over the ranks in the restricted permutation space. To evaluate the statistic and its reference distribution, we develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure to obtain uniform samples on the restricted permutation space and numerically approximate the null distribution of the averaged Kendall’s tau. We numerically compare the power of our procedure to existing state of the art procedures in the literature under various censoring types. We apply the procedure to three real data examples with different censoring types, and compare the results with those by existing methods.