Fall Seminar Series - December 4, 2003
University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Analyzing Panel Count Data with Informative Observation Time

Chiung-Yu Huang
Division of Biostatistics
University of Minnesota

Thursday, December 4, 2003
4:00 PM, 115 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, East Bank Campus
Social at 3:30 PM, 300 Ford Hall

Abstract

 In many longitudinal studies, observations on recurrent events of study subjects are taken at several distinct time points, and, instead of recording the exact event times, only the number of events that have occurred before each observation time points is known. Data of this type are commonly referred to as panel count data. In this paper, we assume proportional rate models for the recurrent event process, where the form of the baseline occurrence rate function is left unspecified and a subject-specific latent variable acts multiplicatively in the rate function. The proposed models allow the recurrent event process and observation times to be correlated through their connections with the latent variable; furthermore, a specific feature of the model is that the distributions of the latent variable and the observation times are not parameterized. Estimation procedures that require no information about the latent variable are proposed for the cumulative baseline rate function and the regression parameters. An application to a bladder tumor study is presented to illustrate proposed methods.

This is joint work with Mei-Chang Wang (Johns Hopkins University) and Ying Zhang (University of Central Florida)