Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Hypothesis Testing For An Extended Cox Model With Time-Varying Coefficients, Takumi Saegusa, Chongzhi Di, Ying Qing Chen

Chongzhi Di

In many randomized clinical trials, the log-rank test has routinely been used to detect a treatment effect under the Cox proportional hazards model for censored time-to-event outcomes. However, it may lose power substantially when the proportional hazards assumption does not hold. There are approaches to testing the proportionality, such as the smoothing spline-based score test by Lin, Zhang and Davidian (2006). In this paper, we consider an extended Cox model assuming time-varying treatment effect. We then use smoothing splines to model the time-varying treatment effect, and we propose spline-based score tests for the overall treatment effect. Our proposed tests take …