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On Bayesian Estimation of Dirichlet Process Lognormal Mixture Models and Comparison of Treatments in Censoring

Received: 13 June 2019     Accepted: 12 July 2019     Published: 30 July 2019
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Abstract

One current interest in medical research is the comparison of treatments in the analysis of survival times of patients. This is particularly problematic, especially for censored data, and when these data consists of several groups, where each group has distinct properties and characteristics but belong to the same distribution. There are various modeling schemes that have been contemplated to overcome these complexities inherent in the data. One such possibility is the Bayesian approach which integrates prior knowledge in analysis. In this paper, we focus on the use of Bayesian lognormal mixture model (MLNM) with related Dirichlet process (DP) prior distribution for estimating patient survival. The advances in the Bayesian paradigm have considerably bolstered the development and application of mixture modelling methodology in the field of survival analysis. The proposed MLN model is compared with the conventional parametric lognormal and the nonparametric Kaplan Meier (K-M) models used to estimate survival to establish model robustness. A simulation study that investigates the impact of censoring on these models is also described. Real data from past research is used to show the resulting Dirichlet process mixture model’s robustness in the comparison of censored treatment. The results indicate that the proposed lognormal mixtures provide a better fit to complex data. Further, the MLN models are able to estimate various survival distributions and therefore appropriate to compare treatments. Clinicians will find these models useful especially when confronted with the obstacle of choosing a suitable therapy for a disease.

Published in International Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications (Volume 5, Issue 2)
DOI 10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13
Page(s) 38-45
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2019. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Bayesian, Lognormal, Mixture Models, Treatment Comparison, Win BUGS

References
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[3] Farcomeni, A. and Nardi, A. (2010). A two-component Weibull mixture to model early and late mortality in a Bayesian framework. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 54: 416–428.
[4] Freireich, E. J., Gehan, E. A., and Frei, E. (1963). The effect of 6-mercaptopurine on the duration of steroid induced remissions in acute leukemia: A model for evaluation of other potentially useful therapy. Blood, 1: 699–716.
[5] Ghahramani, Z. (2015). Probabilistic machine learning and artificial intelligence. Nature, 521: 452-459.
[6] Giudici, P., Givens, G. H., and Mallick, B. K. (2009). Bayesian modeling using WinBUGS. John Wiley and sons, Inc., New Jersey.
[7] Gupta, A., Mukherjee, B., and Upadhyay, S. K. (2008). Weibull extensionmodel: A bayes study using markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 93 (10): 1434–1443.
[8] Hanley, W. and Millea, M. (2018). Maximum entropy priors with derived parameters in a specified distribution. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1804.08143.
[9] Kulasekera, K. B. and Zhao, M. (2008). A pointwise bayes-estimator of the survival probability with censored data. Stat Probab Lett 3, 78: 2597–2603.
[10] Lindley, D. V. (1961). Introduction to probability and statistics from a Bayesian viewpoint: Part 2, Inference. Aberystwyth: University College of Wales.
[11] Mclachlan, G. and Peel, D. (2000). Finite Mixture Models. John Wiely, New York.
[12] Ntzoufras, I. (2009). Bayesian modeling using WinBUGS. John Wiley and sons, Inc., New Jersey.
[13] Samwel Gershman,, J. and Blei David, M. (2012). A tutorial on Bayesian non-parametric model. Journal of Mathematical psychology, 56: 1-12.
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[15] Yee Whye The. (2010). Dirichlet processes. In encyclopedia of machine learning, pages 280-287.
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  • APA Style

    Henry Ondicho Nyambega, George Otieno Orwa. (2019). On Bayesian Estimation of Dirichlet Process Lognormal Mixture Models and Comparison of Treatments in Censoring. International Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications, 5(2), 38-45. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13

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    ACS Style

    Henry Ondicho Nyambega; George Otieno Orwa. On Bayesian Estimation of Dirichlet Process Lognormal Mixture Models and Comparison of Treatments in Censoring. Int. J. Stat. Distrib. Appl. 2019, 5(2), 38-45. doi: 10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13

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    AMA Style

    Henry Ondicho Nyambega, George Otieno Orwa. On Bayesian Estimation of Dirichlet Process Lognormal Mixture Models and Comparison of Treatments in Censoring. Int J Stat Distrib Appl. 2019;5(2):38-45. doi: 10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13,
      author = {Henry Ondicho Nyambega and George Otieno Orwa},
      title = {On Bayesian Estimation of Dirichlet Process Lognormal Mixture Models and Comparison of Treatments in Censoring},
      journal = {International Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications},
      volume = {5},
      number = {2},
      pages = {38-45},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijsd.20190502.13},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijsd.20190502.13},
      abstract = {One current interest in medical research is the comparison of treatments in the analysis of survival times of patients. This is particularly problematic, especially for censored data, and when these data consists of several groups, where each group has distinct properties and characteristics but belong to the same distribution. There are various modeling schemes that have been contemplated to overcome these complexities inherent in the data. One such possibility is the Bayesian approach which integrates prior knowledge in analysis. In this paper, we focus on the use of Bayesian lognormal mixture model (MLNM) with related Dirichlet process (DP) prior distribution for estimating patient survival. The advances in the Bayesian paradigm have considerably bolstered the development and application of mixture modelling methodology in the field of survival analysis. The proposed MLN model is compared with the conventional parametric lognormal and the nonparametric Kaplan Meier (K-M) models used to estimate survival to establish model robustness. A simulation study that investigates the impact of censoring on these models is also described. Real data from past research is used to show the resulting Dirichlet process mixture model’s robustness in the comparison of censored treatment. The results indicate that the proposed lognormal mixtures provide a better fit to complex data. Further, the MLN models are able to estimate various survival distributions and therefore appropriate to compare treatments. Clinicians will find these models useful especially when confronted with the obstacle of choosing a suitable therapy for a disease.},
     year = {2019}
    }
    

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    AU  - Henry Ondicho Nyambega
    AU  - George Otieno Orwa
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    T2  - International Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications
    JF  - International Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications
    JO  - International Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications
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    AB  - One current interest in medical research is the comparison of treatments in the analysis of survival times of patients. This is particularly problematic, especially for censored data, and when these data consists of several groups, where each group has distinct properties and characteristics but belong to the same distribution. There are various modeling schemes that have been contemplated to overcome these complexities inherent in the data. One such possibility is the Bayesian approach which integrates prior knowledge in analysis. In this paper, we focus on the use of Bayesian lognormal mixture model (MLNM) with related Dirichlet process (DP) prior distribution for estimating patient survival. The advances in the Bayesian paradigm have considerably bolstered the development and application of mixture modelling methodology in the field of survival analysis. The proposed MLN model is compared with the conventional parametric lognormal and the nonparametric Kaplan Meier (K-M) models used to estimate survival to establish model robustness. A simulation study that investigates the impact of censoring on these models is also described. Real data from past research is used to show the resulting Dirichlet process mixture model’s robustness in the comparison of censored treatment. The results indicate that the proposed lognormal mixtures provide a better fit to complex data. Further, the MLN models are able to estimate various survival distributions and therefore appropriate to compare treatments. Clinicians will find these models useful especially when confronted with the obstacle of choosing a suitable therapy for a disease.
    VL  - 5
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Author Information
  • Department of Mathematics, Kisii University, Kisii, Kenya

  • Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya

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