• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.689-696
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• 2010

Interval-censored data are commonly found in studies of diseases that progress without symptoms, which require clinical evaluation for detection. Several techniques have been suggested with independent assumption. However, the assumption will not be valid if observations come from clusters. Furthermore, when the cluster size relates to response variables, commonly used methods can bring biased results. For example, in a study on lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease where worms make several nests in the infected person's lymphatic vessels and reside until adulthood, the response variable of interest is the nest-extinction times. Since the extinction times of nests are checked by repeated ultrasound examinations, exact extinction times are not observed. Instead, data are composed of two examination points: the last examination time with living worms and the first examination time with dead worms. Furthermore, as Williamson et al. (2008) pointed out, larger nests show a tendency for low clearance rates. This association has been denoted as an informative cluster size. To analyze the relationship between the numbers of nests and interval-censored nest-extinction times, this study proposes a joint model for the relationship between cluster size and clustered interval-censored failure data.