Case-Control Survival Analysis with a General Semiparametric Shared Frailty Model - a Pseudo Full Likelihood Approach

In this work we deal with correlated failure time (age at onset) data arising from population-based case-control studies, where case and control probands are selected by population-based sampling and an array of risk factor measures is collected for both cases and controls and their relatives. Parameters of interest are effects of risk factors on the hazard function of failure times and within-family dependencies of failure times after adjusting for the risk factors. Due to the retrospective nature of sampling, a large sample theory for existing methods has not been established. We develop a novel estimation techniques for estimating these parameters under a general semiparametric shared frailty model. We also present a simple, easily computed, and non-iterative nonparametric estimator for the cumulative baseline hazard function. A rigorous large sample theory for the proposed estimators of these parameters is given along with simulations and a real data example illustrate the utility of the proposed method.