An additive hazards cure model with informative interval censoring

The existence of a cured subgroup happens quite often in survival studies and many authors considered this under various situations (Farewell in Biometrics 38:1041-1046, 1982; Kuk and Chen in Biometrika 79:531-541, 1992; Lam and Xue in Biometrika 92:573-586, 2005; Zhou et al. in J Comput Graph Stat 27:48-58, 2018). In this paper, we discuss the situation where only interval-censored data are available and furthermore, the censoring may be informative, for which there does not seem to exist an established estimation procedure. For the analysis, we present a three component model consisting of a logistic model for describing the cure rate, an additive hazards model for the failure time of interest and a nonhomogeneous Poisson model for the observation process. For estimation, we propose a sieve maximum likelihood estimation procedure and the asymptotic properties of the resulting estimators are established. Furthermore, an EM algorithm is developed for the implementation of the proposed estimation approach, and extensive simulation studies are conducted and suggest that the proposed method works well for practical situations. Also the approach is applied to a cardiac allograft vasculopathy study that motivated this investigation.