Partially Parametric Estimation of Lifetime Distribution from a Record of Failures and Follow-Ups

In some observational studies, we have often random censoring model. However, the data available may be partially observable censored data consisting of the observed failure times and only those nonfailure times which are subject to follow up. In this paper, we present an extension of the problem of partially parametric estimation of the survival function to such partially observable censored data. The proposed estimator treats the observed failure times nonparametrically and uses a parametric model only for those nonfailure times which are subject to follow-up. We discuss the motivation and construction of the proposed estimator and investigate the limiting properties of the proposed estimator such as asymptotic normality. Also, when the assumed parametric model is exponential, the asymptotic variance of the estimator is obtained. Furthermore, an example is given to compare the proposed estimator with the modified Kaplan Meier(MKM) estimator. From the results, it is shown that the relative efficiency of the proposed estimator is higher than that of the MKM estimator in the follow-up study with increasing time.