Individual frailty excess hazard models in cancer epidemiology.

ABSTRACT: Unobserved individual heterogeneity is a common challenge in population cancer survival studies. This heterogeneity is usually associated with the combination of model misspecification and the failure to record truly relevant variables. We investigate the effects of unobserved individual heterogeneity in the context of excess hazard models, one of the main tools in cancer epidemiology. We propose an individual excess hazard frailty model to account for individual heterogeneity. This represents an extension of frailty modeling to the relative survival framework. In order to facilitate the inference on the parameters of the proposed model, we select frailty distributions which produce closed-form expressions of the marginal hazard and survival functions. The resulting model allows for an int

SUBMITTER: Rubio FJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10560131 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature