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...
| Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | article |
| Publication Date: | 2008 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repository: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Language: | English |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:97494 |
| Online Access: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/97494 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | Cumulative hazard function Efficiency Nelson-Aalen estimator Survival analysis |
| Summary: | 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. |
|---|