Nonparametric estimation for length-biased and right-censored data

Abstract

This paper considers survival data arising from length-biased sampling, where the survival times are left truncated by uniformly distributed random truncation times. We propose a nonparametric estimator that incorporates the information about the length-biased sampling scheme. The new estimator retains the simplicity of the truncation product-limit estimator with a closed-form expression, and has a small efficiency loss compared with the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator, which requires an iterative algorithm. Moreover, the asymptotic variance of the proposed estimator has a closed form, and a variance estimator is easily obtained by plug-in methods. Numerical simulation studies with practical sample sizes are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed method with its competitors. A data analysis of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging is conducted to illustrate the methods and theory. © 2011 Biometrika Trust.