On the accelerated failure time model for current status and interval censored data

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to making inference about the regression parameters in the accelerated failure time model for current status and interval censored data. The estimator is constructed by inverting a Wald-type test for testing a null proportional hazards model. A numerically efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo based resampling method is proposed for obtaining simultaneously the point estimator and a consistent estimator of its variance-covariance matrix. We illustrate our approach with interval censored datasets from two clinical studies. Extensive numerical studies are conducted to evaluate the finite-sample performance of the new estimators.