title: Semiparametric analysis of mixture regression models with competing risks data.
abstract: In the analysis of competing risks data, cumulative incidence function is a useful summary of the overall crude risk for a failure type of interest. Mixture regression modeling has served as a natural approach to performing covariate analysis based on this quantity. However, existing mixture regression methods with competing risks data either impose parametric assumptions on the conditional risks or require stringent censoring assumptions. In this article, we propose a new semiparametric regression approach for competing risks data under the usual conditional independent censoring mechanism. We establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of the resulting estimators. A simple resampling method is proposed to approximate the distribution of the estimated parameters and that of the predicted cumulative incidence functions. Simulation studies and an analysis of a breast cancer dataset demonstrate that our method performs well with realistic sample sizes and is appropriate for practical use.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA. lu@stat.ncsu.edu
authors.forename: Wenbin
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Limin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Peng
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D018931:Antineoplastic Agents, Hormonal / Q000627:therapeutic use; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000401:mortality; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D012044:Regression Analysis; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D013629:Tamoxifen / Q000627:therapeutic use
chemical_list: D018931:Antineoplastic Agents, Hormonal; D013629:Tamoxifen