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A note on the Breslow survival estimator 

Authors: Xuelin Huang a; Robert L. Strawderman b
Affiliations:   a Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics, The University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA
b Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
DOI: 10.1080/10485250500491661
Publication Frequency: 8 issues per year
Published in: journal Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, Volume 18, Issue 1 January 2006 , pages 45 - 56
Formats available: HTML (English) : PDF (English)
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Abstract

This note investigates the structure of the bias and mean squared error (MSE) for a common estimator of the survivor function, namely the Breslow [Breslow, N.E., 1972, Discussion of Professor Cox's paper. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 34, 216-217.] survivor function estimator. Using Itocirc's change-of-variables formula, new formulas for the bias and MSE (hence variance) for this estimator are established. These formulas are subsequently used to investigate a conjecture of Fleming and Harrington [Fleming, T.R. and Harrington, D.P., 1984, Nonparametric estimation of the survival distribution in censored data. Communications in Statistics—Theory and Methods, 13, 2469-2486.]. In particular, we verify that the MSE of the Kaplan-Meier estimator [Kaplan, E.L. and Meier, P., 1958, Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 53, 457-481.] exceeds that of the Breslow estimator, whenever the true survival probability is bounded sufficiently far from zero.
Keywords: Itocirc's formula; Martingale; Nelson-Aalen estimator
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