Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Shape-restricted Single-index Hazard Models
Volume 21, Issue 4 (2023), pp. 681–695
Pub. online: 4 November 2022
Type: Statistical Data Science
Open Access
Received
2 June 2022
2 June 2022
Accepted
5 July 2022
5 July 2022
Published
4 November 2022
4 November 2022
Abstract
Single-index models are becoming increasingly popular in many scientific applications as they offer the advantages of flexibility in regression modeling as well as interpretable covariate effects. In the context of survival analysis, the single-index hazards models are natural extensions of the Cox proportional hazards models. In this paper, we propose a novel estimation procedure for single-index hazard models under a monotone constraint of the index. We apply the profile likelihood method to obtain the semiparametric maximum likelihood estimator, where the novelty of the estimation procedure lies in estimating the unknown monotone link function by embedding the problem in isotonic regression with exponentially distributed random variables. The consistency of the proposed semiparametric maximum likelihood estimator is established under suitable regularity conditions. Numerical simulations are conducted to examine the finite-sample performance of the proposed method. An analysis of breast cancer data is presented for illustration.
Supplementary material
Supplementary MaterialThe Supplementary Material includes the proof of Theorem 2, additonal simulation results, and the R code to implement the proposed method.