Research Article
Empirical Likelihood Inference on Survival Functions under Proportional Hazards Model
Shihong Zhu*, Mai Zhou and Shaoceng WeiDepartment of Statistics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40508, USA
- *Corresponding Author:
- Shihong Zhu
Department of Statistics
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40508, USA
Tel: 859-230-4373
E-mail: [email protected]
Received date: June 19, 2014; Accepted date: July 16, 2014; Published date: July 21, 2014
Citation: Zhu S, Zhou M, Wei S (2014) Empirical Likelihood Inference on Survival Functions under Proportional Hazards Model. J Biomet Biostat 5:206. doi:10.4172/2155-6180.1000206
Copyright: © 2014 Zhu S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are are credited.
| Peer-reviewed Full Article 
Abstract
Under the framework of the Cox model, it is often of interest to assess a subject’s survival prospect through the individualized predicted survival function, and the corresponding pointwise or simultaneous confidence bands as well. The standard approach to the confidence bands relies on the weak convergence of the estimated survival function to a Gaussian process. Such normal approximation based confidence band may have poor small sample coverage accuracy and generally requires an appropriate transformation to improve its performance. In this paper, we propose an empirical likelihood ratio based pointwise and simultaneous confidence bands that are transformation preserving and therefore eliminate the need of any transformations. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by a simulation study and an application to the Mayo Clinical primary biliary cirrhosis dataset.
