title: Confidence intervals for the first crossing point of two hazard functions.
abstract: The phenomenon of crossing hazard rates is common in clinical trials with time to event endpoints. Many methods have been proposed for testing equality of hazard functions against a crossing hazards alternative. However, there has been relatively few approaches available in the literature for point or interval estimation of the crossing time point. The problem of constructing confidence intervals for the first crossing time point of two hazard functions is considered in this paper. After reviewing a recent procedure based on Cox proportional hazard modeling with Box-Cox transformation of the time to event, a nonparametric procedure using the kernel smoothing estimate of the hazard ratio is proposed. The proposed procedure and the one based on Cox proportional hazard modeling with Box-Cox transformation of the time to event are both evaluated by Monte-Carlo simulations and applied to two clinical trial datasets.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistical Science, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. ming-yen.cheng@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Ming-Yen
authors.initials: MY
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.forename: Peihua
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Qiu
authors.forename: Xianming
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.forename: Dongsheng
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models