Cross-Validatory Z-Residual for Diagnosing Shared Frailty Models

Tingxuan Wu, Cindy Feng and Longhai Li

The American Statistician, 2025, vol. 79, issue 2, 198-211

Abstract: Accurate model performance assessment in survival analysis is imperative for robust predictions and informed decision-making. Traditional residual diagnostic tools like martingale and deviance residuals lack a well-characterized reference distribution for censored regression, making numerical statistical tests based on these residuals challenging. Recently, the introduction of Z-residuals for diagnosing survival models addresses this limitation. However, concerns arise from conventional methods that use the entire dataset for both model parameter estimation and residual assessment, which may cause optimistic biases. This article introduces cross-validatory Z-residuals as an innovative approach to address these limitations. Employing a cross-validation (CV) framework, the method systematically partitions the dataset into training and testing sets to reduce the optimistic bias. Our simulation studies demonstrate that, for goodness-of-fit tests and outlier detection, cross-validatory Z-residuals are significantly more powerful (e.g., power increased from 0.2 to 0.6). and more discriminative (e.g., AUC increased from 0.58 to 0.85) than Z-residuals without CV. We also compare the performance of Z-residuals with and without CV in identifying outliers in a real application that models the recurrence time of kidney infection patients. Our findings suggest that cross-validatory Z-residuals can identify outliers, which Z-residuals without CV fail to identify. The CV Z-residual is a more powerful tool than the No-CV Z-residual for checking survival models, particularly in goodness-of-fit tests and outlier detection. We have published a generic function, which is collected in an R package called Zresidual, for computing CV Z-residual for the output of the widely used survival R package.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2024.2421370

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