The Estimation of an Accelerated Failure Time Cure Model with Current Status Data

A cured model is a useful approach for analysing failure time data in which some subjects could eventually experience and others never experience the event of interest. All subjects in the test belong to one of the two groups: the susceptible group and the non-susceptible group. There has been considerable progress in the development of semi-parametric models for regression analysis of time-to-event data. However, most of the current work focuses on right-censored data, especially when the population contains a non-ignorable cured subgroup. In this paper, we propose a semi-parametric cure model for current status data. In general, treatments are developed to both increase the patients' chances of being cured and prolong the survival time among non-cured patients. A logistic regression model is proposed for whether the subject is in the susceptible group. An accelerated failure time regression model is proposed for the event time when the subject is in the non-susceptible group. An EM algorithm is used to maximize the log-likelihood of the observed data. Simulation results show that the proposed method can get efficient estimations.