Subgroup analysis with survival data are most essential for detailed assessment of the risks of medical products in heterogeneous population subgroups. In this paper, we developed a semiparametric mixture modeling strategy in the proportional odds model for simultaneous subgroup identification and regression analysis of survival data that flexibly allows the covariate effects to differ among several subgroups. Neither the membership or the subgroup-specific covariate effects are known a priori. The nonparametric maximum likelihood method together with a pair of MM algorithms with monotone ascent property are proposed to carry out the estimation procedures. Then, we conducted two series of simulation studies to examine the finite sample performance of the proposed estimation procedure. An empirical analysis of German breast cancer data is further provided for illustrating the proposed methodology.
In modeling time-to-event data with long-term survivors, the proportional hazards model is widely used for its easy and direct interpretation as well as the flexibility to accommodate the past information and allow time-varying predictors. This becomes most relevant when the mortality of individuals converges with time, and the estimation and inference based upon the proportional odds model can often yield more accurate and reasonable results than the classical Cox’s proportional hazards model. Along with the fast development of the data science technologies, computational challenges for survival data with increasing sample size and diverging parameter dimension exist. Currently, existing methods for analyzing such data are computationally inconvenient. In this paper, we propose efficient computational methods for analyzing survival data in the proportional odds model, where the nonparametric maximum likelihood approach is combined with the minorization-maximization (MM) algorithm and the regularization scheme to yield fast and accurate estimation and inferential procedures. The illustration of the methodology using extensive simulation studies and then the application to the Veterans’ Administration lung cancer data is also given.
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