With rapid development in medical research, the treatment of diseases including cancer has progressed dramatically and those survivors may die from causes other than the one under study, especially among elderly patients. Motivated by the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) female breast cancer study, background mortality is incorporated into the mixture cure proportional hazards (MCPH) model to improve the cure fraction estimation in population‐based cancer studies. Here, that patients are “cured” is defined as when the mortality rate of the individuals in diseased group returns to the same level as that expected in the general population, where the population level mortality is presented by the mortality table of the United States. The semiparametric estimation method based on the EM algorithm for the MCPH model with background mortality (MCPH+BM) is further developed and validated via comprehensive simulation studies. Real data analysis shows that the proposed semiparametric MCPH+BM model may provide more accurate estimation in population‐level cancer study.

中文翻译：

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基于人群的癌症生存率分析中治愈分数的半参数估计。

随着医学研究的飞速发展，包括癌症在内的疾病的治疗取得了长足的进步，幸存者可能死于除研究原因之外的其他原因，特别是在老年患者中。受监视，流行病学和最终结果（SEER）女性乳腺癌研究的推动，将背景死亡率纳入混合治疗比例风险（MCPH）模型中，以改善基于人群的癌症研究中的治愈率估计。在此，将患者“治愈”定义为患病组中个体的死亡率恢复到与普通人群相同的预期水平，其中人口水平的死亡率由美国的死亡率表表示。通过综合仿真研究，进一步开发和验证了基于EM算法的MCPH模型的半参数估计方法，该模型具有背景死亡率（MCPH + BM）。实际数据分析表明，所提出的半参数MCPH + BM模型可能在人群水平的癌症研究中提供更准确的估计。