DYNAMIC MODELING AND PENALIZED LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION FOR DISCRETE-TIME SURVIVAL-DATA

This paper describes a dynamic or state-space approach for analyzing discrete time or grouped survival data. Simultaneous estimation of baseline hazard functions and of time-varying covariate effects is based on maximization of posterior densities or, equivalently, a penalized likelihood, leading to Kalman-type smoothing algorithms. Data-driven choice of unknown smoothing parameters is possible via an EM-type procedure. The methods are illustrated by applications to real data.