article
Testing homogeneity in Weibull-regression models
Registro en:
10.1002/bimj.200410064
Autor
Bolfarine, Heleno
Valença, Dione M.
Resumen
In survival studies with families or geographical units it may be of interest testing whether such groups
are homogeneous for given explanatory variables. In this paper we consider score type tests for group
homogeneity based on a mixing model in which the group effect is modelled as a random variable. As
opposed to hazard-based frailty models, this model presents survival times that conditioned on the
random effect, has an accelerated failure time representation. The test statistics requires only estimation
of the conventional regression model without the random effect and does not require specifying the
distribution of the random effect. The tests are derived for a Weibull regression model and in the
uncensored situation, a closed form is obtained for the test statistic. A simulation study is used for
comparing the power of the tests. The proposed tests are applied to real data sets with censored data.