The Destructive Zero-Inflated Power Series Cure Rate Models for Carcinogenesis Studies

In this paper, we propose a new flexible survival model called the destructive zero-inflated power series cure rate model. This new model describes a realistic interpretation for the biological mechanism of the occurrence of the event of interest in studies of carcinogenesis in the presence of the competing latent causes. The maximum likelihood method is used for estimating the model parameters. For different sample sizes, various scenarios are simulated to evaluate the precision of the estimates. The usefulness of the new cure rate survival model is illustrated by means of a cutaneous melanoma data set.