Statistical Analysis of Illness-Death Processes and Semicompeting Risks Data

Xu, Kalbfleisch and Tai have a new paper in Biometrics. They make a compelling case against a latent failure times approach to the analysis of semi-competing risks data, advocating to instead take a classical cause-specific hazards approach. Moreover, they note that semi-competing risks is essentially just an illness-death model. They consider models where the intensities have a shared Gamma frailty and present methods for (Non-parametric) maximum likelihood estimation. In addition, covariates can be included acting proportionally on the conditional hazards (an alternative approach with proportionality on the marginal hazards is also outlined).