Mixture cure models have been widely used to analyze survival data with a cure fraction. They assume that a subgroup of the individuals under study will never experience the event (cured subjects). So, the goal is twofold: to study both the cure probability and the failure time of the uncured individuals through a proper survival function (latency). The R package npcure implements a completely nonparametric approach for estimating these functions in mixture cure models, considering right-censored survival times. Nonparametric estimators for the cure probability and the latency as functions of a covariate are provided. Bootstrap bandwidth selectors for the estimators are included. The package also implements a nonparametric covariate significance test for the cure probability, which can be applied with a continuous, discrete, or qualitative covariate.
Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2021-027.zip
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For attribution, please cite this work as
López-Cheda, et al., "npcure: An R Package for Nonparametric Inference in Mixture Cure Models", The R Journal, 2021
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2021-027,
author = {López-Cheda, Ana and Jácome, M. Amalia and López-de-Ullibarri, Ignacio},
title = {npcure: An R Package for Nonparametric Inference in Mixture Cure Models},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2021},
note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2021-027},
doi = {10.32614/RJ-2021-027},
volume = {13},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {21-41}
}