Date of Award

Spring 2012

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MSc)

Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Supervisor

N. Balakrishnan

Language

English

Abstract

In this thesis, we perform a survival analysis for right-censored data of populations with a cure rate. We consider two cure rate models based on the Geometric distribution and Poisson distribution, which are the special cases of the Conway-Maxwell distribution. The models are based on the assumption that the number of competing causes of the event of interest follows Conway-Maxwell distribution. For various sample sizes, we implement a simulation process to generate samples with a cure rate. Under this setup, we obtain the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the model parameters by using the gamlss R package. Using the asymptotic distribution of the MLE as well as the parametric bootstrap method, we discuss the construction of confidence intervals for the model parameters and their performance is then assessed through Monte Carlo simulations.

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