Modelling the Survival of Western Honey Bee <i>Apis mellifera</i> and the African Stingless Bee <i>Meliponula ferruginea</i> Using Semiparametric Marginal Proportional Hazards Mixture Cure Model

Abstract

Classical survival analysis assumes all subjects will experience the event of interest, but in some cases, a portion of the population may never encounter the event. These survival methods further assume independent survival times, which is not valid for honey bees, which live in nests. The study introduces a semi-parametric marginal proportional hazards mixture cure (PHMC) model with exchangeable correlation structure, using generalized estimating equations for survival data analysis. The model was tested on clustered right-censored bees survival data with a cured fraction, where two bee species were subjected to different entomopathogens to test the effect of the entomopathogens on the survival of the bee species. The Expectation-Solution algorithm is used to estimate the parameters. The study notes a weak positive association between cure statuses ( 1 0.