Empirical comparison between the Nelson-Aalen Estimator and the Naive Local Constant Estimator

The Nelson-Aalen estimator is widely used in biostatistics as a non-parametric estimator of the cumulative hazard function based on a right censored sample. A number of alternative estimators can be mentioned, namely, the naive local constant estimator (Guillén, Nielsen and Pérez-Marín, 2007) which...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Pérez-Marín, Ana M..
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2008
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:97494
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/97494
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Cumulative hazard function
Efficiency
Nelson-Aalen estimator
Survival analysis
Descripción
Sumario:The Nelson-Aalen estimator is widely used in biostatistics as a non-parametric estimator of the cumulative hazard function based on a right censored sample. A number of alternative estimators can be mentioned, namely, the naive local constant estimator (Guillén, Nielsen and Pérez-Marín, 2007) which provides improved bias versus variance properties compared to the traditional Nelson-Aalen estimator. Nevertheless, an empirical comparison of these two estimators has never been carried out. In this paper the efficiency performance of these two estimators when applied to real survival data are compared. Our results suggest that the efficiency improvement introduced by the naive local constant estimator is highly remarkable for all distribution quantiles, especially for low quantiles.