Kaplan-Meier estimator in competing risk contexts

Authors : Pablo Martínez CAMBLOR

Pages : 1161-1173

View : 15 | Download : 5

Publication Date : 2016-08-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Survival analysis has become in a common procedure in biomedical re- searches. Conventionally, the well-known nonparametric Kaplan-Meier insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(KM); estimator is used in order to approximate the real survivor curve. However, in competing risk contexts where more than one failure cause compete to occur and only one of them is of interest, the direct use of the Kaplan-Meier statistic does not perform correctly and, in or- der to obtain a good estimation, it must be adapted. In this work, via Monte Carlo simulations, the author explores the behavior of the Kaplan-Meier estimator in a competing risk context. In addition, dif- ferences between KM and multiple decrement methods are pointed out. Finally, a real-data problem is used in order to illustrate the situation.
Keywords : Competing risks, Kaplan Meier estimator, Multiple decrement, Survival Analysis