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 (Guill ´en, Nielsen and P´erez-Mar´ın, 2007) wh...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Pérez Marín, Ana María
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2008
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2099/8940
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/2099/8940
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Survival analysis (Biometry)
Cumulative hazard function
Efficiency
Nelson-Aalen estimator
Survival analysis
Anàlisi de supervivència (Biometria)
Classificació AMS::62 Statistics::62N Survival analysis and censored data
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Estadística matemàtica
Descrição
Resumo: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 (Guill ´en, Nielsen and P´erez-Mar´ın, 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.