In time-to-event studies it is common the presence of a fraction of individuals not expecting to experience the event of interest; these individuals who are immune to the event or cured for the disease during the study are known as long-term survivors. In addition, in many studies it is observed two lifetimes associated to the same individual, and in some cases there exists a dependence structure between them. In these situations, the usual existing lifetime distributions are not appropriate to model data sets with long-term survivors and dependent bivariate lifetimes. In this study, it is proposed a bivariate model based on a Weibull standard distribution with a dependence structure based on fifteen different copula functions. We assumed the Weibull distribution due to its wide use in survival data analysis and its greater flexibility and simplicity, but the presented methods can be adapted to other continuous survival distributions. Three examples, considering real data sets are introduced to illustrate the proposed methodology. A Bayesian approach is assumed to get the inferences for the parameters of the model where the posterior summaries of interest are obtained using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation methods and the Openbugs software. For the data analysis considering different real data sets it was assumed fifteen different copula models from which is was possible to find models with satisfactory fit for the bivariate lifetimes in presence of long-term survivors.
Bivariate lifetime distributions are of great importance in studies related to interdependent components, especially in engineering applications. In this paper, we introduce two bivariate lifetime assuming three- parameter Weibull marginal distributions. Some characteristics of the proposed distributions as the joint survival function, hazard rate function, cross factorial moment and stress-strength parameter are also derived. The inferences for the parameters or even functions of the parameters of the models are obtained under a Bayesian approach. An extensive numerical application using simulated data is carried out to evaluate the accuracy of the obtained estimators to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed model, we also include an example with real data from which it is possible to see that the proposed model leads to good fits to the data.
In this paper, we introduce maximum likelihood and Bayesian parameter estimation for the exponentiated discrete Weibull (EDW) distribution in presence of randomly right censored data. We also consider the inclusion of a cure fraction in the model. The performance of the maximum likelihood estimation approach is assessed by conducting an extensive simulation study with different sample sizes and different values for the parameters of the EDW distribution. The usefuness of the proposed model is illustrated with two examples considering real data sets.
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