Medical cost has received increasing interest recently in Biostatistics and public health. Statistical analysis and inference of life time medical cost have been challenging by the fact that the survival times are censored on some study subjects and their subsequent cost are unknown. Huang...

Kendall and Gehan estimating functions are used to estimate the regression parameter in accelerated failure time (AFT) model with censored observations. The accelerated failure time model is the preferred survival analysis method because it maintains a consistent association between the...

Duration data often suffer from both left-truncation and right-censoring. We show how both deficiencies can be overcome at the same time when estimating the hazard rate nonparametrically by kernel smoothing with the nearest-neighbor bandwidth. Smoothing Turnbull’s estimator of the cumulative...

In England in the Middle Ages, inheritance data were recorded of tenants who owned land from the Crown. Male adult mortality is estimated from these data. A tenant was allowed to sell his land. Only if he still owned land at death, his age at death was observed; so death was right censored by sell...

Markov switching regression processes belong to the class of Hidden Markov models (HMMs). They provide a higher flexibility than, for example, simple (auto)regression. The main reason for their popularity is the convenient interpretability. For sufficiently long time series, the different...

Mean residual life function, or life expectancy, is an important function to characterize distribution of residual life. The proportional mean residual life model by Oakes and Dasu (1990) is a regression tool to study the association between life expectancy and its associated covariates....

Quasi-independence is a common assumption for analyzing truncated data. To verify this condition, we propose a class of weighted log-rank type statistics that includes existing tests proposed by Tsai (1990) and Martin and Betensky (2005) as special cases. To choose an appropriate weight function...