Alternating event processes during lifetimes: population dynamics and statistical inference

Russell T. Shinohara, Yifei Sun and Mei-Cheng Wang ()
Additional contact information
Russell T. Shinohara: University of Pennsylvania
Yifei Sun: Johns Hopkins University
Mei-Cheng Wang: Johns Hopkins University

Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data, 2018, vol. 24, issue 1, No 7, 110-125

Abstract: Abstract In the literature studying recurrent event data, a large amount of work has been focused on univariate recurrent event processes where the occurrence of each event is treated as a single point in time. There are many applications, however, in which univariate recurrent events are insufficient to characterize the feature of the process because patients experience nontrivial durations associated with each event. This results in an alternating event process where the disease status of a patient alternates between exacerbations and remissions. In this paper, we consider the dynamics of a chronic disease and its associated exacerbation-remission process over two time scales: calendar time and time-since-onset. In particular, over calendar time, we explore population dynamics and the relationship between incidence, prevalence and duration for such alternating event processes. We provide nonparametric estimation techniques for characteristic quantities of the process. In some settings, exacerbation processes are observed from an onset time until death; to account for the relationship between the survival and alternating event processes, nonparametric approaches are developed for estimating exacerbation process over lifetime. By understanding the population dynamics and within-process structure, the paper provide a new and general way to study alternating event processes.

Keywords: Alternating event process; Incidence rate; Nonparametric estimation; Prevalence probability; Recurrent events (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10985-017-9404-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:lifeda:v:24:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10985-017-9404-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10985

DOI: 10.1007/s10985-017-9404-5

Access Statistics for this article

Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data is currently edited by Mei-Ling Ting Lee

More articles in Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().