Date of Award

Fall 12-2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Mathematics & Statistics

Program/Concentration

Computational and Applied Mathematics

Committee Director

Kayoung Park

Committee Member

Lucia Tabacu

Committee Member

N. Rao Chaganty

Committee Member

Abdullah M. Al-Taiar

Abstract

In general, the change point problem considers inference of a change in distribution for a set of time-ordered observations. This has applications in a large variety of fields and can also apply to survival data. With improvements to medical diagnoses and treatments, incidences and mortality rates have changed. However, the most commonly used analysis methods do not account for such distributional changes. In survival analysis, change point problems can concern a shift in a distribution for a set of time-ordered observations, potentially under censoring or truncation.

In this dissertation, we first propose a sequential testing approach for detecting multiple change points in the Weibull accelerated failure time model, since this is sufficiently flexible to accommodate increasing, decreasing, or constant hazard rates and is also the only continuous distribution for which the accelerated failure time model can be reparametrized as a proportional hazards model. Our sequential testing procedure does not require the number of change points to be known; this information is instead inferred from the data. We conduct a simulation study to show that the method accurately detects change points and estimates the model. The numerical results along with a real data application demonstrate that our proposed method can detect change points in the hazard rate.

In survival analysis, most existing methods compare two treatment groups for the entirety of the study period. Some treatments may take a length of time to show effects in subjects. This has been called the time-lag effect in the literature, and in cases where time-lag effect is considerable, such methods may not be appropriate to detect significant differences between two groups. In the second part of this dissertation, we propose a novel non-parametric approach for estimating the point of treatment time-lag effect by using an empirical divergence measure. Theoretical properties of the estimator are studied. The results from the simulated data and real data example support our proposed method.

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DOI

10.25777/8hmx-xx44

ISBN

9798557048590

ORCID

0000-0002-4919-4841

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