Conditional independence test of failure and truncation times: Essential tool for method selection
Conference
64th ISI World Statistics Congress - Ottawa, Canada
Format: IPS Abstract
Keywords: "survival, and
Wednesday 19 July 2 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. (Canada/Eastern)
Abstract
Conditional independence assumption of truncation and failure times conditioning on covariates is a fundamental and common assumption in the regression analysis of left-truncated and right-censored data. Testing for this assumption is essential to ensure the correct inference on the failure time, but this has often been overlooked in the literature. With consideration of challenges caused by left truncation and right censoring, tests for this conditional independence assumption are developed in which the generalized odds ratio derived from a Cox proportional hazards model on the failure time and the concept of Kendall's tau are combined. Except for the Cox proportional hazards model, no additional model assumptions are imposed, and the distributions of the truncation time and conditioning variables are unspecified. The performance of the proposed test has been evaluated through simulation studies and real studies.