There has arisen a considerable body of research addressing the estimation of association between paired failure times in the presence of competing risks. In a 2002 paper, Bandeen-Roche and Liang proposed the conditional cause-specific hazard ratio (CCSHR) as a measure of this association and a parametric method by which to estimate it. The method features an interpretable decomposition of the CCSHR into factors describing the association between a pair’s times to first failure among multiple failure causes and the association in pair members’ propensities to fail due to a common cause. There were indications of sensitivity to model assumptions, however, in the 2002 work. Here we report a detailed study of the method’s sensitivity to its parametric assumptions. We conclude that the method’s performance is most sensitive to mis-specification of temporality in the association between pair members’ first-failure times and of correlation between propensity to fail early or late and the propensity to fail of a specific cause. Implications for methods development are highlighted.

中文翻译：

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受竞争风险影响的双变量故障时间数据中关联的参数估计：对基本假设的敏感性。

已经出现了大量研究来解决在存在竞争风险的情况下成对故障时间之间的关联的估计。Bandeen-Roche和Liang在2002年的论文中提出了有条件的因果风险比（CCSHR）作为衡量这种关联的一种方法，并以此为依据进行估计。该方法的特征在于将CCSHR分解为可解释的因素，这些因素描述了在多个失效原因中，一对首次失效时间与一对成员由于共同原因而失效的倾向之间的关联。但是，在2002年的工作中，有迹象表明对模型假设敏感。在这里，我们报告了对该方法对其参数假设的敏感性的详细研究。我们得出的结论是，该方法的性能对配对成员的首次失效时间之间的关联以及与之相关的早期或晚期失败倾向与特定原因的失败倾向之间的相关性，对时间错误性的错误描述最为敏感。突出了方法开发的含义。