Statistical Modelling 9 (2009), 259297
Tutorial on methods for interval-censored data and their implementation in R
Guadalupe Gómez
Departament d'Estadística i I.O.
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Barcelona
Spain
eMail: lupe.gomez@upc.edu
M Luz Calle
Departament de Biologia de Sistemes
Universitat de Vic
Vic
Spain
Ramon Oller
Departament d’Economia, Matemàtica i Informàtica
Universitat de Vic
Vic
Spain
Klaus Langohr
Programa de Recerca en Neuropsicofarmacologia
Institut Municipal d’Investigació Mèdica
Spain
Abstract:
Interval censoring is encountered in many practical situations when the
event of interest cannot be observed and it is only known to have occurred
within a time window. The theory for the analysis of interval-censored data
has been developed over the past three decades and several reviews have
been written. However, it is still a common practice in medical and
reliability studies to simplify the interval censoring structure of the
data into a more standard right censoring situation by, for instance,
imputing the midpoint of the censoring interval. The availability of
software for right censoring might well be the main reason for this
simplifying practice. In contrast, several methods have been developed
to deal with interval-censored data and the corresponding algorithms
to make the procedures feasible are scattered across the statistical
software or remain behind the personal computers of many researchers.
The purpose of this tutorial is to present, in a pedagogical and unified
manner, the methodology and the available software for analyzing
interval-censored data. The paper covers frequentist non-parametric,
parametric and semiparametric estimating approaches, non-parametric
tests for comparing survival curves and a section on simulation of
interval-censored data. The methods and the software are described
using the data from a dental study.
Keywords:
interval censoring; simulation; software R; survival analysis
Downloads:
Example data and R-code
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