Handling Censoring and Censored Data in Survival Analysis: A Standalone Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The study recognized the worth of understanding the how’s of handling censoring and censored data in survival analysis and the potential biases it might cause if researchers fail to identify and handle the concepts with utmost care. We systematically reviewed the concepts of censoring and how researchers have handled censored data and brought all the ideas under one umbrella. The review was done on articles written in the English language spanning from the late fifties to the present time. We googled through NCBI, PubMed, Google scholar and other websites and identified theories and publications on the research topic. Revelation was that censoring has the potential of biasing results and reducing the statistical power of analyses if not handled with the appropriate techniques it requires. We also found that, besides the four main approaches (complete-data analysis method; imputation approach; dichotomizing the data; the likelihood-based approach) to handling censored data, there were several other innovative approaches to handling censored data. These methods include censored network estimation; conditional mean imputation method; inverse probability of censoring weighting; maximum likelihood estimation; Buckley-Janes least squares algorithm; simple multiple imputation strategy; filter algorithm; Bayesian framework; -substitution method; search-and-score-hill-climbing algorithm and constraint-based conditional independence algorithm; frequentist; Markov chain Monte Carlo for imputed data; quantile regression; random effects hierarchical Cox proportional hazards; Lin’s Concordance Correlation Coefficient; classical maximum likelihood estimate. We infer that the presence of incomplete information about subjects does not necessarily mean that such information must be discarded, rather they must be incorporated into the study for they might carry certain relevant information that holds the key to the understanding of the research. We anticipate that through this review, researchers will develop a deeper understanding of this concept in survival analysis and select the appropriate statistical procedures for such studies devoid of biases.