A new approach to modeling the cure rate in the presence of interval censored data

Suvra Pal (), Yingwei Peng and Wisdom Aselisewine
Additional contact information
Suvra Pal: University of Texas at Arlington
Yingwei Peng: Queen’s University
Wisdom Aselisewine: University of Texas at Arlington

Computational Statistics, 2024, vol. 39, issue 5, No 14, 2743-2769

Abstract: Abstract We consider interval censored data with a cured subgroup that arises from longitudinal followup studies with a heterogeneous population where a certain proportion of subjects is not susceptible to the event of interest. We propose a two component mixture cure model, where the first component describing the probability of cure is modeled by a support vector machine-based approach and the second component describing the survival distribution of the uncured group is modeled by a proportional hazard structure. Our proposed model provides flexibility in capturing complex effects of covariates on the probability of cure unlike the traditional models that rely on modeling the cure probability using a generalized linear model with a known link function. For the estimation of model parameters, we develop an expectation maximization-based estimation algorithm. We conduct simulation studies and show that our proposed model performs better in capturing complex effects of covariates on the cure probability when compared to the traditional logit link-based two component mixture cure model. This results in more accurate (smaller bias) and precise (smaller mean square error) estimates of the cure probabilities, which in-turn improves the predictive accuracy of the latent cured status. We further show that our model’s ability to capture complex covariate effects also improves the estimation results corresponding to the survival distribution of the uncured. Finally, we apply the proposed model and estimation procedure to an interval censored data on smoking cessation.

Keywords: Support vector machine; Platt scaling; Sequential minimal optimization; Mixture cure rate model; EM algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00180-023-01389-7 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:compst:v:39:y:2024:i:5:d:10.1007_s00180-023-01389-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/statistics/journal/180/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00180-023-01389-7

Access Statistics for this article

Computational Statistics is currently edited by Wataru Sakamoto, Ricardo Cao and Jürgen Symanzik

More articles in Computational Statistics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().