This paper discusses regression analysis of clustered failure time data, which means that the failure times of interest are clustered into small groups instead of being independent. Clustering occurs in many fields such as medical studies. For the problem, a number of methods have been proposed, but most of them apply only to clustered right-censored data. In reality, the failure time data is often interval-censored. That is, the failure times of interest are known only to lie in certain intervals. We propose an estimating equation-based approach for regression analysis of clustered interval-censored failure time data generated from the additive hazards model. A major advantage of the proposed method is that it does not involve the estimation of any baseline hazard function. Both asymptotic and finite sample properties of the proposed estimates of regression parameters are established and the method is illustrated by the data arising from a lymphatic filariasis study.

中文翻译：

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聚类间隔删失失效时间数据与加性风险模型的回归分析

本文讨论了聚类故障时间数据的回归分析，这意味着感兴趣的故障时间被聚类为小组而不是独立的。聚类发生在许多领域，例如医学研究。对于这个问题，已经提出了许多方法，但大多数只适用于聚类的右删失数据。实际上，故障时间数据通常是间隔删失的。即，已知感兴趣的故障时间仅位于某些间隔内。我们提出了一种基于估计方程的方法，用于对从加性风险模型生成的聚类间隔删失故障时间数据进行回归分析。所提出方法的一个主要优点是它不涉及任何基线危险函数的估计。