• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.715-724
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• 2010

Recurrent event data occurs when a subject experience the event of interest several times and has been found in biomedical studies, sociology and engineering. Several diverse approaches have been applied to analyze the recurrent events (Cook and Lawless, 2007). In this study, we analyzed the YTOP(Young Traffic Offenders Program) dataset which consists of 192 drivers with conviction dates by speeding violation and traffic rule violation. We consider a subject-specific effect, frailty, to reflect the individual's driving behavior and extend to time-varying frailty effect. Another feature of this study is about the redefinition of risk set. During the study, subject may be under suspension and this period is regarded as non-risk period. Thus the risk variables are reformatted according to suspension and termination time.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.621-632
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• 2012

Recurrent event data can be easily found in longitudinal studies such as clinical trials, reliability fields, and the social sciences; however, there are a few observations that disappear temporarily in sight during the follow-up and then suddenly reappear without notice like the Young Traffic Offenders Program(YTOP) data collected by Farmer et al. (2000). In this article we focused on inference for a cumulative mean function of the recurrent event data with these incomplete observation gaps. Defining a corresponding risk set would be easily accomplished if we know the exact intervals where the observation gaps occur. However, when they are incomplete (if their starting times are known but their terminating times are unknown) we need to estimate a distribution function for the terminating times of the observation gaps. To accomplish this, we treated them as interval-censored and then estimated their distribution using the EM algorithm proposed by Turnbull (1976). We proposed a nonparametric estimator for the cumulative mean function and also a nonparametric test to compare the cumulative mean functions of two groups. Through simulation we investigated the finite-sample performance of the proposed estimator and proposed test. Finally, we applied the proposed methods to YTOP data.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.387-393
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• 2014

Recurrent gap times are analyzed with diverse methods under several assumptions such as a marginal model or a frailty model. Several resampling techniques have been recently suggested to estimate the covariate effect; however, these approaches can be applied with a time-fixed covariate. According to simulation results, these methods result in biased estimates for a time-varying covariate which is often observed in a longitudinal study. In this paper, we extend a resampling method by incorporating new weights and sampling scheme. Simulation studies are performed to compare the suggested method with previous resampling methods. The proposed method is applied to estimate the effect of an educational program on traffic conviction data where a program participation occurs in the middle of the study.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1117-1125
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• 2014

In a longitudinal study, subjects can experience same type of events repeatedly. Also, there may exist intermittent dropouts resulting in repeated observation gaps during which no recurrent events are observed. Furthermore, when such observation gaps have incomplete forms caused by the unknown termination times of observation gaps, ordinary approaches result in biased estimates. In this study, we investigate the effect of ignoring observation gaps and propose methods to overcome this problem. For estimating the distribution of unknown termination times, an interval-censored mechanism is applied and two cases are considered. Simulation studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Conviction data of young drivers with several suspensions are analyzed to illustrate the suggested approach.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.327-336
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• 2014

Recurrent event data occurs when a subject experiences same type of event repeatedly and is found in various areas such as the social sciences, Economics, medicine and public health. To analyze recurrent event data either a total time or a gap time is adopted according to research interest. In this paper, we analyze recurrent event data with incomplete observation gap using a gap time scale. That is, some subjects leave temporarily from a study and return after a while. But it is not available when the observation gaps terminate. We adopt an interval censoring mechanism for estimating the termination time. Furthermore, to model the association among gap times of a subject, a frailty effect is incorporated into a model. Programs included in Survival package of R program are implemented to estimate the covariate effect as well as the variance of frailty effect. YTOP (Young Traffic Offenders Program) data is analyzed with both proportional hazard model and a weibull regression model.