title: ESTIMATING MEAN SURVIVAL TIME: WHEN IS IT POSSIBLE?
abstract: For right censored survival data, it is well known that the mean survival time can be consistently estimated when the support of the censoring time contains the support of the survival time. In practice, however, this condition can be easily violated because the follow-up of a study is usually within a finite window. In this article we show that the mean survival time is still estimable from a linear model when the support of some covariate(s) with nonzero coefficient(s) is unbounded regardless of the length of follow-up. This implies that the mean survival time can be well estimated when the support of linear predictor is wide in practice. The theoretical finding is further verified for finite samples by simulation studies. Simulations also show that, when both models are correctly specified, the linear model yields reasonable mean square prediction errors and outperforms the Cox model, particularly with heavy censoring and short follow-up time.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, University of Pittsburgh.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Nan
keywords: Gehan weights; censored linear regression; empirical process theory; mean survival time; unbounded covariate support