The existence of a cured subgroup happens quite often in survival studies and many authors considered this under various situations (Farewell in Biometrics 38:1041–1046, 1982; Kuk and Chen in Biometrika 79:531–541, 1992; Lam and Xue in Biometrika 92:573–586, 2005; Zhou et al. in J Comput Graph Stat 27:48–58, 2018). In this paper, we discuss the situation where only interval-censored data are available and furthermore, the censoring may be informative, for which there does not seem to exist an established estimation procedure. For the analysis, we present a three component model consisting of a logistic model for describing the cure rate, an additive hazards model for the failure time of interest and a nonhomogeneous Poisson model for the observation process. For estimation, we propose a sieve maximum likelihood estimation procedure and the asymptotic properties of the resulting estimators are established. Furthermore, an EM algorithm is developed for the implementation of the proposed estimation approach, and extensive simulation studies are conducted and suggest that the proposed method works well for practical situations. Also the approach is applied to a cardiac allograft vasculopathy study that motivated this investigation.

治愈亚组的存在经常发生在生存研究中，许多作者在各种情况下都考虑了这一点（生物识别学再见 38:1041–1046, 1982；生物测量学中的 Kuk 和 Chen 79:531–541, 1992；生物测量学中的 Lam 和 Xue 92:573–586, 2005；Zhou et al. in J Comput Graph Stat 27:48–58, 2018)。在本文中，我们讨论了只有区间删失数据可用的情况，而且删失可能提供信息，对此似乎不存在既定的估计程序。为了进行分析，我们提出了一个三分量模型，其中包括用于描述治愈率的逻辑模型、用于感兴趣的故障时间的附加风险模型和用于观察过程的非齐次泊松模型。对于估计，我们提出了一个筛最大似然估计程序，并建立了所得估计量的渐近特性。此外，开发了一种 EM 算法来实现所提出的估计方法，并进行了广泛的模拟研究，并表明所提出的方法在实际情况下运行良好。此外，该方法还应用于激发本次调查的心脏同种异体移植血管病变研究。