Research Article

Modifying Weighted Kaplan-Meier Test for Two-Sample Survival Comparison

Seung-Hwan Lee
Illinois Wesleyan University, USA
* Corresponding author
Eun-Joo Lee
Millikin University, USA
DOI icon 10.24018/ejmath.2022.3.1.93

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Submitted 2021-12-22
Published 2022-02-20

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Article Main Content

This paper presents an approach to improving the weighted Kaplan-Meier test statistics in order to make it a more useful tool for a long-term comparison of two underlying survival distributions in the presence of right-censored data. The procedures are based on the use of some weight function that involves the percentage of censored data as a component. Some versatile procedures for the alternative, not pre-specified, are also discussed. Numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed procedures. For illustration, the procedures are applied to real-world data in clinical trials, where patients with tongue cancer are divided into two groups according to tumor DNA.

 

Keywords: Censored data, Kaplan-Meier estimator, Log-rank test, Survival distribution, Weighted Kaplan-Meier statistics

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