Order restricted inference for comparing the cumulative incidence of a competing risk over several populations [chapter]

Hammou El Barmi, Subhash Kochar, Hari Mukerjee
2008 Beyond Parametrics in Interdisciplinary Research: Festschrift in Honor of Professor Pranab K. Sen  
There is a substantial literature on testing for the equality of the cumulative incidence functions associated with one specific cause in a competing risks setting across several populations against specific or all alternatives. In this paper we propose an asymptotically distribution-free test when the alternative is that the incidence functions are linearly ordered, but not equal. The motivation stems from the fact that in many examples such a linear ordering seems reasonable intuitively and
more » ... borne out generally from empirical observations. These tests are more powerful when the ordering is justified. We also provide estimators of the incidence functions under this ordering constraint, derive their asymptotic properties for statistical inference purposes, and show improvements over the unrestricted estimators when the order restriction holds.
doi:10.1214/193940307000000040 fatcat:7l6xfyo5vzfmzphwoelwzr36gu