Graphical Tests for the Frailty Distribution in the Shared Frailty Model |
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Authors: | P Economou |
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Institution: | Department of Mathematics , National Technical University of Athens , Athens, Greece |
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Abstract: | We extend a diagnostic plot for the frailty distribution in proportional hazards models to the case of shared frailty. The plot is based on a closure property of exponential family failure distributions with canonical statistics z and g(z), namely that the frailty distribution among survivors at time t has the same form, with the same values of the parameters associated with g(z). We extend this property to shared frailty, considering various definitions of a “surviving” cluster at time t. We illustrate the effectiveness of the method in the case where the “death” of the cluster is defined by the first death among its members. |
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Keywords: | Diagnostic plots Proportional hazards Shared frailty |
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