REGRESSION ANALYSIS OF CASE II INTERVAL-CENSORED FAILURE TIME DATA WITH THE ADDITIVE HAZARDS MODEL

Interval-censored failure time data often arise in clinical trials and medical follow-up studies, and a few methods have been proposed for their regression analysis using various regression models (Finkelstein (1986); Huang (1996); Lin, Oakes, and Ying (1998); Sun (2006)). This paper proposes an estimating equation-based approach for regression analysis of interval-censored failure time data with the additive hazards model. The proposed approach is robust and applies to both noninformative and informative censoring cases. A major advantage of the proposed method is that it does not involve estimation of any baseline hazard function. The implementation of the propsoed approach is easy and fast. Asymptotic properties of the proposed estimates are established and some simulation results and an application are provided.