Censored quantile regression offers a valuable supplement to Cox proportional hazards model for survival analysis. Existing work in the literature often requires stringent assumptions, such as unconditional independence of the survival time and the censoring variable or global linearity at all quantile levels. Moreover, some of the work use recursive algorithms making it challenging to derive asymptotic normality. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new locally weighted censored quantile regression approach that adopts the redistribution-of-mass idea and employs a local reweighting scheme. Its validity only requires conditional independence of the survival time and the censoring variable given the covariates, and linearity at the particular quantile level of interest. Our method leads to a simple algorithm that can be conveniently implemented with R software. Applying recent theory of M-estimation with infinite dimensional parameters, we establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator. The proposed method is studied via simulations and is illustrated with the analysis of an acute myocardial infarction dataset.

No abstract

The paper discusses the asymptotic validity of posterior inference of pseudo-Bayesian quantile regression methods with complete or censored data when an asymmetric Laplace likelihood is used. The asymmetric Laplace likelihood has a special place in the Bayesian quantile regression framework because the usual quantile regression estimator can be derived as the maximum likelihood estimator under such a model, and this working likelihood enables highly efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior sampling. However, it seems to be underrecognised that the stationary distribution for the resulting posterior does not provide valid posterior inference directly. We demonstrate that a simple adjustment to the covariance matrix of the posterior chain leads to asymptotically valid posterior inference. Our simulation results confirm that the posterior inference, when appropriately adjusted, is an attractive alternative to other asymptotic approximations in quantile regression, especially in the presence of censored data.

We develop inference procedures for longitudinal data where some of the measurements are censored by fixed constants. We consider a semi-parametric quantile regression model that makes no distributional assumptions. Our research is motivated by the lack of proper inference procedures for data from biomedical studies where measurements are censored due to a fixed quantification limit. In such studies the focus is often on testing hypotheses about treatment equality. To this end, we propose a rank score test for large sample inference on a subset of the covariates. We demonstrate the importance of accounting for both censoring and intra-subject dependency and evaluate the performance of our proposed methodology in a simulation study. We then apply the proposed inference procedures to data from an AIDS-related clinical trial. We conclude that our framework and proposed methodology is very valuable for differentiating the influences of predictors at different locations in the conditional distribution of a response variable.

We study estimation in quantile regression when covariates are measured with errors. Existing methods require stringent assumptions, such as spherically symmetric joint distribution of the regression and measurement error variables, or linearity of all quantile functions, which restrict model flexibility and complicate computation. In this paper, we develop a new estimation approach based on corrected scores to account for a class of covariate measurement errors in quantile regression. The proposed method is simple to implement. Its validity requires only linearity of the particular quantile function of interest, and it requires no parametric assumptions on the regression error distributions. Finite-sample results demonstrate that the proposed estimators are more efficient than the existing methods in various models considered.