Survival analysis with temporal covariate effects

Abstract

We propose a natural generalization of the Cox regression model, in which the regression coefficients have direct interpretations as temporal covariate effects on the survival function. Under the conditionally independent censoring mechanism, we develop a smoothing-free estimation procedure with a set of martingale-based equations. Our estimator is shown to be uniformly consistent and to converge weakly to a Gaussian process. A simple resampling method is proposed for approximating the limiting distribution of the estimated coefficients. Second-stage inferences with time-varying coefficients are developed accordingly. Simulations and a real example illustrate the practical utility of the proposed method. Finally, we extend this proposal of temporal covariate effects to the general class of linear transformation models and also establish a connection with the additive hazards model.