Ensemble methods for survival function estimation with time-varying covariates.

Survival data with time-varying covariates are common in practice. If relevant, they can improve on the estimation of a survival function. However, the traditional survival forests-conditional inference forest, relative risk forest and random survival forest-have accommodated only time-invariant covariates.

Joint latent class trees: A tree-based approach to modeling time-to-event and longitudinal data.

In this paper, we propose a semiparametric, tree-based joint latent class model for the joint behavior of longitudinal and time-to-event data. Existing joint latent class approaches are parametric and can suffer from high computational cost. The most common parametric approach, the joint latent class model, further restricts analysis to using time-invariant covariates in modeling survival risks and latent class memberships.

An ensemble method for interval-censored time-to-event data.

Interval-censored data analysis is important in biomedical statistics for any type of time-to-event response where the time of response is not known exactly, but rather only known to occur between two assessment times. Many clinical trials and longitudinal studies generate interval-censored data; one common example occurs in medical studies that entail periodic follow-up. In this article, we propose a survival forest method for interval-censored data based on the conditional inference framework.

Survival trees for interval-censored survival data.

Interval-censored data, in which the event time is only known to lie in some time interval, arise commonly in practice, for example, in a medical study in which patients visit clinics or hospitals at prescheduled times and the events of interest occur between visits. Such data are appropriately analyzed using methods that account for this uncertainty in event time measurement. In this paper, we propose a survival tree method for interval-censored data based on the conditional inference framework.

Survival trees for left-truncated and right-censored data, with application to time-varying covariate data.

Tree methods (recursive partitioning) are a popular class of nonparametric methods for analyzing data. One extension of the basic tree methodology is the survival tree, which applies recursive partitioning to censored survival data. There are several existing survival tree methods in the literature, which are mainly designed for right-censored data.

Risk-management and risk-analysis-based decision tools for attacks on electric power.

Incident data about disruptions to the electric power grid provide useful information that can be used as inputs into risk management policies in the energy sector for disruptions from a variety of origins, including terrorist attacks. This article uses data from the Disturbance Analysis Working Group (DAWG) database, which is maintained by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), to look at incidents over time in the United States and Canada for the period 1990-2004. Negative binomial regression, logistic regression, and weighted least squares regression are used to gain a better understanding of how these disturbances varied over time and by season during this period, and to analyze how characteristics such as number of customers lost and outage duration are related to different characteristics of the outages.

Prediction in censored survival data: a comparison of the proportional hazards and linear regression models.

Although the analysis of censored survival data using the proportional hazards and linear regression models is common, there has been little work examining the ability of these estimators to predict time to failure. This is unfortunate, since a predictive plot illustrating the relationship between time to failure and a continuous covariate can be far more informative regarding the risk associated with the covariate than a Kaplan-Meier plot obtained by discretizing the variable. In this paper the predictive power of the Cox (1972, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 34, 187-202) proportional hazards estimator and the Buckley-James (1979, Biometrika 66, 429-436) censored regression estimator are compared.

Estimation and inference in pharmacokinetic models: the effectiveness of model reformulation and resampling methods for functions of parameters.

It is well known that high parameter estimate correlations and asymptotic variance estimates can cause estimation and inference problems in the analysis of pharmacokinetic models. In this paper we show that analysis of three important functions of pharmacokinetic parameters, the half-life, mean residence time, and the area under the curve, can sometimes be greatly improved by reformulating the model to address collinearity and by using the bootstrap to form confidence intervals. The resultant estimators can be more accurate than the original ones, and resultant confidence intervals can be narrower.