A Flexible Joint Longitudinal-Survival Model for Analyzing Longitudinally Sampled Biomarkers

Abstract

We propose a flexible joint longitudinal-survival framework to examine the association between longitudinally collected biomarkers and a time-to-event endpoint. More specifically, we use our method for analyzing the survival outcome of end-stage renal disease patients with time-varying serum albumin measurements. Our proposed method is robust to common parametric assumptions in that it avoids explicit specification of the distribution of longitudinal responses and allows for a subject-specific baseline hazard in the survival component. Fully joint estimation is performed to account for uncertainty in the estimated longitudinal biomarkers that are included in the survival model.