Interval-Censored Time-to-Event Data: Methods and Applications collects the most recent techniques, models, and computational tools for interval-censored time-to-event data. Top biostatisticians from academia, biopharmaceutical industries, and government agencies discuss how these advances are impacting clinical trials and biomedical research.Divid

This book collects and unifies statistical models and methods that have been proposed for analyzing interval-censored failure time data. It provides the first comprehensive coverage of the topic of interval-censored data and complements the books on right-censored data. The focus of the book is on nonparametric and semiparametric inferences, but it also describes parametric and imputation approaches. This book provides an up-to-date reference for people who are conducting research on the analysis of interval-censored failure time data as well as for those who need to analyze interval-censored data to answer substantive questions.

Survival Analysis with Interval-Censored Data: A Practical Approach with Examples in R, SAS, and BUGS provides the reader with a practical introduction into the analysis of interval-censored survival times. Although many theoretical developments have appeared in the last fifty years, interval censoring is often ignored in practice. Many are unaware of the impact of inappropriately dealing with interval censoring. In addition, the necessary software is at times difficult to trace. This book fills in the gap between theory and practice. Features: -Provides an overview of frequentist as well as Bayesian methods. -Include a focus on practical aspects and applications. -Extensively illustrates the methods with examples using R, SAS, and BUGS. Full programs are available on a supplementary website. The authors: Kris Bogaerts is project manager at I-BioStat, KU Leuven. He received his PhD in science (statistics) at KU Leuven on the analysis of interval-censored data. He has gained expertise in a great variety of statistical topics with a focus on the design and analysis of clinical trials. Arnošt Komárek is associate professor of statistics at Charles University, Prague. His subject area of expertise covers mainly survival analysis with the emphasis on interval-censored data and classification based on longitudinal data. He is past chair of the Statistical Modelling Society and editor of Statistical Modelling: An International Journal. Emmanuel Lesaffre is professor of biostatistics at I-BioStat, KU Leuven. His research interests include Bayesian methods, longitudinal data analysis, statistical modelling, analysis of dental data, interval-censored data, misclassification issues, and clinical trials. He is the founding chair of the Statistical Modelling Society, past-president of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics, and fellow of ISI and ASA.

Multi-State Survival Models for Interval-Censored Data introduces methods to describe stochastic processes that consist of transitions between states over time. It is targeted at researchers in medical statistics, epidemiology, demography, and social statistics. One of the applications in the book is a three-state process for dementia and survival in the older population. This process is described by an illness-death model with a dementia-free state, a dementia state, and a dead state. Statistical modelling of a multi-state process can investigate potential associations between the risk of moving to the next state and variables such as age, gender, or education. A model can also be used to predict the multi-state process. The methods are for longitudinal data subject to interval censoring. Depending on the definition of a state, it is possible that the time of the transition into a state is not observed exactly. However, when longitudinal data are available the transition time may be known to lie in the time interval defined by two successive observations. Such an interval-censored observation scheme can be taken into account in the statistical inference. Multi-state modelling is an elegant combination of statistical inference and the theory of stochastic processes. Multi-State Survival Models for Interval-Censored Data shows that the statistical modelling is versatile and allows for a wide range of applications.

Missing data pose challenges to real-life data analysis. Simple ad-hoc fixes, like deletion or mean imputation, only work under highly restrictive conditions, which are often not met in practice. Multiple imputation replaces each missing value by multiple plausible values. The variability between these replacements reflects our ignorance of the true (but missing) value. Each of the completed data set is then analyzed by standard methods, and the results are pooled to obtain unbiased estimates with correct confidence intervals. Multiple imputation is a general approach that also inspires novel solutions to old problems by reformulating the task at hand as a missing-data problem. This is the second edition of a popular book on multiple imputation, focused on explaining the application of methods through detailed worked examples using the MICE package as developed by the author. This new edition incorporates the recent developments in this fast-moving field. This class-tested book avoids mathematical and technical details as much as possible: formulas are accompanied by verbal statements that explain the formula in accessible terms. The book sharpens the reader’s intuition on how to think about missing data, and provides all the tools needed to execute a well-grounded quantitative analysis in the presence of missing data.

Making complex methods more accessible to applied researchers without an advanced mathematical background, the authors present the essence of new techniques available, as well as classical techniques, and apply them to data. Practical suggestions for implementing the various methods are set off in a series of practical notes at the end of each section, while technical details of the derivation of the techniques are sketched in the technical notes. This book will thus be useful for investigators who need to analyse censored or truncated life time data, and as a textbook for a graduate course in survival analysis, the only prerequisite being a standard course in statistical methodology.