Defective regression models for cure rate modeling with interval-censored data

Regression models in survival analysis are most commonly applied for right-censored survival data. In some situations, the time to the event is not exactly observed, although it is known that the event occurred between two observed times. In practice, the moment of observation is frequently taken as the event occurrence time, and the interval-censored mechanism is ignored. We present a cure rate defective model for interval-censored event-time data. The defective distribution is characterized by a density function whose integration assumes a value less than one when the parameter domain differs from the usual domain. We use the Gompertz and inverse Gaussian defective distributions to model data containing cured elements and estimate parameters using the maximum likelihood estimation procedure. We evaluate the performance of the proposed models using Monte Carlo simulation studies. Practical relevance of the models is illustrated by applying datasets on ovarian cancer recurrence and oral lesions in children after liver transplantation, both of which were derived from studies performed at A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in São Paulo, Brazil.