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Main Authors: Oodally, Ajmal, Wang, Craig, Li, Zheng, Morris, Tim, Mütze, Tobias, Chakravartty, Arunava
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19988
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author Oodally, Ajmal
Wang, Craig
Li, Zheng
Morris, Tim
Mütze, Tobias
Chakravartty, Arunava
author_facet Oodally, Ajmal
Wang, Craig
Li, Zheng
Morris, Tim
Mütze, Tobias
Chakravartty, Arunava
contents Treatment policy estimands are frequently favored by regulators, as they assess the effect of treatment assignment regardless of post-randomization events. Despite best efforts, missing data due to study discontinuation cannot be fully avoided and, for time-to-event endpoints, typically manifests as right censoring. Study discontinuation is often more likely following intercurrent events, particularly when it coincides with treatment discontinuation, raising concerns about violations of the independent censoring assumption. Although the independent censoring assumption is routinely adopted for the main analyses, it may be unrealistic in practice and could lead to biased estimation of the treatment effect under the treatment policy estimand. Tipping-point analyses provide a structured framework to assess the robustness of trial conclusions to departures from the independent censoring assumption. This paper describes and contrasts model-based and two ad hoc tipping point approaches, which involve "landmark" or "percentile sampling" based imputation. We illustrate their application using re-constructed examples based on real clinical trials, highlighting their underlying assumptions and implications for interpretation and clinical plausibility assessments of different tipping point approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19988
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tipping Point Sensitivity Analysis for Missing Data in Time-to-Event Endpoints: Model-Based and Ad hoc Approaches
Oodally, Ajmal
Wang, Craig
Li, Zheng
Morris, Tim
Mütze, Tobias
Chakravartty, Arunava
Methodology
Treatment policy estimands are frequently favored by regulators, as they assess the effect of treatment assignment regardless of post-randomization events. Despite best efforts, missing data due to study discontinuation cannot be fully avoided and, for time-to-event endpoints, typically manifests as right censoring. Study discontinuation is often more likely following intercurrent events, particularly when it coincides with treatment discontinuation, raising concerns about violations of the independent censoring assumption. Although the independent censoring assumption is routinely adopted for the main analyses, it may be unrealistic in practice and could lead to biased estimation of the treatment effect under the treatment policy estimand. Tipping-point analyses provide a structured framework to assess the robustness of trial conclusions to departures from the independent censoring assumption. This paper describes and contrasts model-based and two ad hoc tipping point approaches, which involve "landmark" or "percentile sampling" based imputation. We illustrate their application using re-constructed examples based on real clinical trials, highlighting their underlying assumptions and implications for interpretation and clinical plausibility assessments of different tipping point approaches.
title Tipping Point Sensitivity Analysis for Missing Data in Time-to-Event Endpoints: Model-Based and Ad hoc Approaches
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19988