Estimating the survival distribution when ascertainment of vital status is subject to delay
生存状态确认存在延迟时的生存分布估计
During the interim stages of most large scale clinical trials, knowledge that a patient is alive or dead is usually not up to date. This is due to the pattern of patient visits to hospitals, as well as the administrative set-up used by the study to obtain the information on vital status. If the process of ascertaining vital status is not completely random, then the usual method of estimating the survival curve based on the Kaplan-Meier estimator may be biased. For this…