• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.285-296
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• 2014

The quantile residual life function has been effectively used to interpret results from the analysis of the proportional hazards model for censored survival data; however, the quantile residual life function is not always estimable with currently available semi-parametric regression methods in the presence of heavy censoring. A parametric regression approach may circumvent the difficulty of heavy censoring, but parametric assumptions on a baseline hazard function can cause a potential bias. This article proposes a Bayesian semi-parametric regression approach for inference on an unknown baseline hazard function while adjusting for available covariates. We consider a model-based approach but the proposed method does not suffer from strong parametric assumptions, enjoying a closed-form specification of the parametric regression approach without sacrificing the flexibility of the semi-parametric regression approach. The proposed method is applied to simulated data and heavily censored survival data to estimate various quantile residual lifetimes and adjust for important prognostic factors.