1. Analysis of clustered competing risks data using subdistribution hazard models with multivariate frailties.
- Author
-
Ha ID, Christian NJ, Jeong JH, Park J, and Lee Y
- Subjects
- Breast Neoplasms drug therapy, Computer Simulation, Humans, Middle Aged, Multicenter Studies as Topic, Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic, Risk, Tamoxifen therapeutic use, Likelihood Functions, Multivariate Analysis, Proportional Hazards Models
- Abstract
Competing risks data often exist within a center in multi-center randomized clinical trials where the treatment effects or baseline risks may vary among centers. In this paper, we propose a subdistribution hazard regression model with multivariate frailty to investigate heterogeneity in treatment effects among centers from multi-center clinical trials. For inference, we develop a hierarchical likelihood (or h-likelihood) method, which obviates the need for an intractable integration over the frailty terms. We show that the profile likelihood function derived from the h-likelihood is identical to the partial likelihood, and hence it can be extended to the weighted partial likelihood for the subdistribution hazard frailty models. The proposed method is illustrated with a dataset from a multi-center clinical trial on breast cancer as well as with a simulation study. We also demonstrate how to present heterogeneity in treatment effects among centers by using a confidence interval for the frailty for each individual center and how to perform a statistical test for such heterogeneity using a restricted h-likelihood., (© The Author(s) 2014.)
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF