ictest: do logrank or Wilcoxon type tests on interval censored data

In interval: Weighted Logrank Tests and NPMLE for Interval Censored Data

do logrank or Wilcoxon type tests on interval censored data

Description

The ictest function performs several different tests for interval censored data, and the wlr_trafo function takes interval censored data and returns one of several rank-based scores as determined by the scores option. The default for ictest is to perform a permutation test, either asymptotic or exact depending on the size of the data. Other types of tests (the scores test form or multiple imputation form) are supported. The 5 different score options allow different tests including generalizations to interval censored data of either the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test (scores="wmw") or the logrank test (scores="logrank1" or scores="logrank2") (see details).

The function calls the icfit function, if an icfit object is not provided.

Usage

## Default S3 method:
ictest(L, R, group,  
    scores = c("logrank1","logrank2","wmw","normal","general"),
    rho=NULL,
    alternative= c("two.sided", "less", "greater"),   
    icFIT=NULL,
    initfit=NULL, 
    icontrol=icfitControl(),
    exact=NULL,
    method=NULL,
    methodRule=methodRuleIC1,
    mcontrol=mControl(),
    Lin=NULL,
    Rin=NULL, 
    dqfunc=NULL, ...)

## S3 method for class 'formula'
ictest(formula, data, subset, na.action, ...)




## Default S3 method:
wlr_trafo(x, R=NULL, 
    scores = c("logrank1", "logrank2", "wmw","normal","general"), 
    icFIT = NULL, initfit =NULL, control=icfitControl(),
    Lin=NULL,Rin=NULL,dqfunc=NULL,...)

## S3 method for class 'Surv'
wlr_trafo(x,...)
 
## S3 method for class 'data.frame'
wlr_trafo(x,...)

Arguments

L	numeric vector of left endpoints of censoring interval (equivalent to first element of Surv when type='interval2'), if R is NULL then represents exact failure time
R	numeric vector of right endpoints of censoring interval (equivalent to second element of Surv when type='interval2', see details)
x	response, either a Surv object or a numeric vector representing the left endpoint. If the latter and R is NULL then x is treated as exact
group	a vector denoting the group for which the test is desired. If group is a factor or character then a k-sample test is performed, where k is the number of unique values of group. If group is numeric then a "correlation" type test is performed. If there are only two groups, both methods give the same results.
scores	character vector defining the scores: "logrank1" (default), "logrank2", "wmw" or others (see details)
rho	either 0 (gives scores="logrank1"), or 1 (gives scores="wmw"), ignored if NULL (see Note)
alternative	character giving alternative for two-sample and trend tests, K-sample should be two.sided (see details)
icFIT	a precalculated icfit object for increased computation speed. This should be the icfit from the pooled data. Normally initfit should be used instead (see Warning)
initfit	an object of class icfit or icsurv or a character vector giving a function name, used for the initial estimate (see Warning). Ignored if icFIT is not null
icontrol	list of arguments for controling NPMLE algorithm in call to icfit (default icfitControl)
formula	a formula with response a numeric vector (which assumes no censoring) or Surv object, the right side of the formula is the group variable. No strata() is allowed
data	data frame for variables in formula
subset	an optional vector specifying a subset of observations to be used
na.action	a function which indicates what should happen when the data contain NAs. Defaults to getOption("na.action")
Surv	a Surv object, see Surv
exact	a logical value, TRUE denotes exact test, ignored if method is not NULL
method	a character value, one of 'pclt','exact.network','exact.ce','exact.mc', 'scoretest', 'wsr.HLY', 'wsr.pclt', 'wsr.mc'. If NULL method is chosen by methodRule which may use the value of exact.
methodRule	a function used to choose the method, default methodRuleIC1. (see details in perm)
mcontrol	list of arguments for controling algorithms of different methods (see mControl)
Lin	logical vector, should L be included in the interval? (see details)
Rin	logical vector, should R be included in the interval? (see details)
dqfunc	function used with general scores (see details)
control	list of arguments for controling NPMLE algorithm in call to icfit (default icfitControl)
...	values passed to other functions

Details

The censoring in the default case (when Lin=Rin=NULL) assumes there are n (n=length(L)) failure times, and the ith one is in the interval between L[i] and R[i]. The default is not to include L[i] in the interval unless L[i]=R[i], and to include R[i] in the interval unless R[i]=Inf. When Lin and Rin are not NULL they describe whether to include L and R in the associated interval. If either Lin or Rin is length 1 then it is repeated n times, otherwise they should be logicals of length n.

Three different types of scores are compared in depth in Fay (1999): When scores='logrank1' this gives the most commonly used logrank scores for right censored data, and reduces to the scores of Sun (1996) for interval censored data. When scores='logrank2' this gives the scores associated with the grouped proportional hazards model of Finkelstein (1986). When scores='wmw' this gives the generalized Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney scores.

The other options for scores only allow the permutation methods and follow cases where the error under the grouped continuous model is either normally distributed ( scores='normal') or distributed by some other distribution (scores='general') (see Fay, 1996). For scores='general' the user must supply the function (dqfunc) which represents the density function of the inverse distribution function of the error. For example, scores='general' with dqfunc equal to function(x){ dnorm(qnorm(x))} gives the same results as scores='normal' or with dqfunc equal to function(x){ dlogis(qlogis(x))} gives the same results (theoretically, but perhaps not exactly when calculated) as scores='wmw'.

For censored data two common likelihoods are the marginal likelihood of the ranks and the likelihood with nuisance parameters for the baseline survival. Here we use the latter likelihood (as in Finkelstein, 1986, Fay, 1996, and Sun, 1996).

Because of theoretical difficulties (discussed below), the default method (method=NULL with methodRule=methodRuleIC1) is to perform a permutation test on the scores. There are several ways to perform the permutation test, and the function methodRuleIC1 chooses which of these ways will be used. The choice is basically between using a permutational central limit theorem (method="pclt") or using an exact method. There are several algorithms for the exact method (see perm ). Note that there are two exact two-sided methods and the default is to essentially double the smaller of the one-sided p-values (tsmethod='central'), while the default in the coin package is different (see mControl and the tsmethod option).

Another method is to perform a standard score test (method="scoretest"). It is difficult to prove the asymptotic validity of the standard score tests for this likelihood because the number of nuisance parameters typically grows with the sample size and often many of the parameters are equal at the nonparametric MLE, i.e., they are on the boundary of the parameter space (Fay, 1996). Specifically, when the score test is performed then an adjustment is made so that the nuisance parameters are defined based on the data and do not approach the boundary of the parameter space (see Fay, 1996). Theoretically, the score test should perform well when there are many individuals but few observation times, and its advantage in this situation is that it retains validity even when the censoring mechanism may depend on the treatment.

Another method is to use multiple imputation, or within subject resampling (method="wsr.HLY") (Huang, Lee, and Yu, 2008). This method samples interval censored observations from the nonparametric distribution, then performs the usual martingale-based variance. A different possibility is to use a permutational central limit theorem variance for each wsr (method="wsr.pclt") or use Monte Carlo replications to get an possibly exact method from each within subject resampling (method="wsr.mc").

Note that when icfit and ictest are used on right censored data, because of the method of estimating variance is different, even Sun's method does not produce exactly the standard logrank test results.

Fay and Shaw (2010) gives the mathematical expressions for the different tests.

Note that the default method performs reasonably well even when the assessment times depend on the treatment (see Fay and Shih, 2012, Fay and Hunsberger, 2013). If your primary concern is with retaining type I error and you do not mind conservativeness, then the wsr.pclt or wsr.mc methods can be used.

Value

The function wlr_trafo returns only the numeric vector of scores, while ictest returns an object of class ‘ictest’, which is a list with the following values.

scores	This is a vector the same length as L and R, containing the rank scores (i.e., the ci values in Fay, 1999 equation 2). These scores are calculated by wlr_trafo.
U	The efficient score vector. When group is a factor or character vector then each element of U has the interpretation as the weighted sum of "observed" minus "expected" deaths for the group element defined by the label of U. Thus negative values indicate better than average survival (see Fay, 1999).
N	number of observations in each group
method	full description of the test
data.name	description of data variables
algorithm	character vector giving algorithm used in calculation, value of method or of result of methodRule. One of ‘pclt’, 'exact.network', etc.
statistic	either the chi-square or Z statistic, or NULL for exact methods
parameter	degrees of freedom for chi-square statistic
alternative	alternative hypothesis
alt.phrase	phrase used to describe the alternative hypothesis
p.value	p value associated with alternative
p.values	vector of p-values under different alternatives
p.conf.int	confidence interval on p.value, for method='exact.mc' only
nmc	number of Monte Carlo replications, for method='exact.mc' only
nwsr	number of within subject resamplings, for WSR methods only
V	covariance matrix for U, output for method='scoretest' only
d2L.dB2	second derivative of log likelihood with respect to beta,output for method='scoretest' only
d2L.dgam2	second derivative of log likelihood with respect to gamma, output for method='scoretest' only
d2L.dBdgam	derivative of log likelihood with respect to beta and gamma, output for method='scoretest' only
estimate	output of test statistic from permutation method, difference in means in scores, output only for permutation methods
null.value	0, null value of test statistics from permutation method, output only with permutation methods
np	number of permutation replications within each WSR, for method='wsr.mc' only
fit	object of class 'icfit' giving results of NPMLE of all responses combined (ignoring group variable)
call	the matched call

Warning

Because the input of icFIT is only for saving computational time, no checks are made to determine if the icFIT is in fact the correct one. Thus you may get wrong answers with no warnings if you input the wrong icFIT object. The safer way to save computational time is to input into initfit either a precalculated icfit object or an icsurv object from a function in the Icens package such as EMICM. When this is done, you will get either the correct answer or a warning even when you input a bad guess for the initfit. Additionally, you may specify a function name for initfit. The default is NULL which uses a simple initial fit function (it is a weighted average of the A matrix, see icfit.default code). A fast but somewhat unstable function uses initcomputeMLE which uses the computeMLE function from the 'MLEcens' package. See help for icfit for details on the initfit option.

Note

The rho argument gives the scores which match the scores from the survdiff function, so that when rho=0 then scores="logrank1", and when rho=1 then scores="wmw". These scores will exactly match those used in survdiff, but the function survdiff uses an asymptotic method based on the score test to calculate p-values, while ictest uses permutation methods to calculate the p-values, so that the p-values will not match exactly. The rho argument overides the scores argument, so that if rho is not NULL then scores is ignored.

Author(s)

Michael P. Fay

References

Fay, MP (1996). "Rank invariant tests for interval censored data under the grouped continuous model". Biometrics, 52: 811-822.

Fay, MP (1999). "Comparing Several Score Tests for Interval Censored Data." Statistics in Medicine, 18: 273-285 (Correction: 1999, 18: 2681).

Fay, MP and Shaw, PA (2010). Exact and Asymptotic Weighted Logrank Tests for Interval Censored Data: The interval R package. Journal of Statistical Software. \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.18637/jss.v036.i02")}. 36 (2):1-34.

Fay, MP and Shih JH. (2012). Weighted Logrank Tests for Interval Censored Data when Assessment Times Depend on Treatment. Statistics in Medicine 31, 3760-3772.

Fay, MP and Hunsberger, SA. (2013). Practical Issues on Using Weighted Logrank Tests with Interval Censored Events in Clinical Trials. Chapter 13 in Interval-Censored Time-to-Event Data: Methods and Applications, Chen, D-G, Sun, J, and Peace, KE (editors) Chapman and Hall/CRC.

Finkelstein, DM (1986). "A proportional hazards model for interval censored failure time data" Biometrics, 42: 845-854.

Huang, J, Lee, C, Yu, Q (2008). "A generalized log-rank test for interval-censored failure time data via multiple imputation" Statistics in Medicine, 27: 3217-3226.

Sun, J (1996). "A non-parametric test for interval censored failure time data with applications to AIDS studies". Statistics in Medicine, 15: 1387-1395.

See Also

icfit, EMICM, computeMLE

Examples

   ## perform a logrank-type test using the permutation form of the test
data(bcos)
testresult<-ictest(Surv(left,right,type="interval2")~treatment, scores="logrank1",data=bcos)
testresult
## perform a Wilcoxon rank sum-type test
## using asymptotic permutation variance
left<-bcos$left
right<-bcos$right
trt<-bcos$treatment
## save time by using previous fit
ictest(left,right,trt, initfit=testresult$fit, method="pclt",scores="wmw")

interval documentation built on Aug. 25, 2023, 1:08 a.m.