Longitudinal studies are often conducted to explore the cohort and age effects in many scientific areas. The within cluster correlation structure plays a very important role in longitudinal data analysis. This is because not only can an estimator be improved by incorporating the within cluster...

Longitudinal studies are often conducted to explore the cohort and age effects in many scientific areas. The within cluster correlation structure plays a very important role in longitudinal data analysis. This is because not only can an estimator be improved by incorporating the within cluster...

A proportional hazard function together with partial likelihood estimation is the most common approach to the analysis of censored data. However, partial likelihood estimation is established on the grounds that the censoring is non-informative. The partial likelihood approach enjoys many good...