Bias correction in the hierarchical likelihood approach to the analysis of multivariate survival data

Frailty models are useful for measuring unobserved heterogeneity in risk of failures across clusters, providing cluster-specific risk prediction. In a frailty model, the latent frailties shared by members within a cluster are assumed to act multiplicatively on the hazard function. In order to obtain parameter and frailty variate estimates, we consider the hierarchical likelihood (H-likelihood) approach (Ha, Lee and Song, 2001. Hierarchical-likelihood approach for frailty models. Biometrika 88, 233-243) in which the latent frailties are treated as "parameters" and estimated jointly with other parameters of interest. We find that the H-likelihood estimators perform well when the censoring rate is low, however, they are substantially biased when the censoring rate is moderate to high. In this paper, we propose a simple and easy-to-implement bias correction method for the H-likelihood estimators under a shared frailty model. We also extend the method to a multivariate frailty model, which incorporates complex dependence structure within clusters. We conduct an extensive simulation study and show that the proposed approach performs very well for censoring rates as high as 80%. We also illustrate the method with a breast cancer data set. Since the H-likelihood is the same as the penalized likelihood function, the proposed bias correction method is also applicable to the penalized likelihood estimators.