Semiparametric Copula-Based Regression Modeling of Semi-competing Risks Data

Authors

Hong Zhu
Yu Lan
Jing Ning
Yu Shen

Publication Date

1-1-2022

Journal

Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods

DOI

10.1080/03610926.2021.1881122

PMID

36353187

PMCID

PMC9640177

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

January 2023

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Author MSS

Abstract

Semi-competing risks data often arise in medical studies where the terminal event (e.g., death) censors the non-terminal event (e.g., cancer recurrence), but the non-terminal event does not prevent the subsequent occurrence of the terminal event. This article considers regression modeling of semi-competing risks data to assess the covariate effects on the respective non-terminal and terminal event times. We propose a copula-based framework for semi-competing risks regression with time-varying coefficients, where the dependence between the non-terminal and terminal event times is characterized by a copula and the time-varying covariate effects are imposed on two marginal regression models. We develop a two-stage inferential procedure for estimating the association parameter in the copula model and time-varying regression parameters. We evaluate the finite sample performance of the proposed method through simulation studies and illustrate the method through an application to Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-Medicare data for elderly women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and initially treated with breast-conserving surgery.

Keywords

Copula model, dependent censoring, nonlinear estimating equation, pseudo-likelihood, semi-competing risks

Published Open-Access

yes

Recommended Citation

Zhu, Hong; Lan, Yu; Ning, Jing; et al., "Semiparametric Copula-Based Regression Modeling of Semi-competing Risks Data" (2022). Faculty, Staff and Student Publications. 2016.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/uthgsbs_docs/2016