Recent Advances in Robust Design for Accelerated Failure Time Models with Type I Censoring

Abstract

Many fields including clinical and manufacturing areas usually perform life-testing experiments and accelerated failure time models (AFT) play an essential role in these investigations. In these models the covariate causes an accelerant effect on the course of the event through the term named acceleration factor (AF). Despite the influence of this factor on the model, recent studies state that the form of AF is weakly or partially known in most real applications. In these cases, the classical optimal design theory may produce low efficient designs since they are highly model dependent. This work explores planning and techniques that can provide the best robust designs for AFT models with type I censoring when the form of the AF is misspecified, which is an issue little explored in the literature. Main idea is focused on considering the AF to vary over a neighbourhood of perturbation functions and assuming the mean square error matrix as the basis for measuring the design quality. A key result of this research was obtaining the asymptotic MSE matrix for type I censoring under the assumption of known variance regardless the selected failure time distribution. In order to illustrate the applicability of previous result to a study case, analytical characterizations and numerical approaches were developed to construct optimal robust designs under different contaminating scenarios for a failure time following a log-logistic distribution.