Regression analysis of mixed panel count data with dependent terminal events

Event history studies are commonly conducted in many fields, and a great deal of literature has been established for the analysis of the two types of data commonly arising from these studies: recurrent event data and panel count data. The former arises if all study subjects are followed continuously, while the latter means that each study subject is observed only at discrete time points. In reality, a third type of data, a mixture of the two types of the data earlier, may occur and furthermore, as with the first two types of the data, there may exist a dependent terminal event, which may preclude the occurrences of recurrent events of interest. This paper discusses regression analysis of mixed recurrent event and panel count data in the presence of a terminal event and an estimating equation-based approach is proposed for estimation of regression parameters of interest. In addition, the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator are established, and a simulation study conducted to assess the finite-sample performance of the proposed method suggests that it works well in practical situations. Finally, the methodology is applied to a childhood cancer study that motivated this study. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.