A general approach for cure models in survival analysis (Q2215740)

The authors propose a novel approach to estimate a mixture cure model when covariates are present and the lifetime is subject to random right censoring. A parametric model for the cure proportion is used, while the conditional survival function of the uncured subjects is unspecified. The approach is based on an inversion which allows to write the survival function as a function of the distribution of the observable variables. This leads to a general class of models which allows a flexible and rich modeling of the conditional survival function. The authors show the consistency and the asymptotic normality of the model parameters and also consider in more detail the case where kernel estimators are used for the nonparametric part of the model. The new estimators are compared with the estimators from a Cox mixture cure model via simulations and the new model is applied on a medical data set.