Sequentially Doubly Robust Estimation of Conditional Survival Probability with Time-Varying Covariates
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| author | Qiu, Hongxiang Carone, Marco Luedtke, Alex Gilbert, Peter B. |
| author_facet | Qiu, Hongxiang Carone, Marco Luedtke, Alex Gilbert, Peter B. |
| contents | It is often of interest to study the association between covariates and the cumulative incidence of a right-censored time-to-event outcome. When time-varying covariates are measured on a fixed discrete time scale, it is desirable to account for these more up-to-date covariates when addressing censoring. For example, in vaccine trials, it is of interest to study the association between immune response levels after administering the vaccine and the cumulative incidence of the endpoint, while accounting for loss to follow-up explained by immune response levels measured at multiple post-vaccination visits. Existing methods rely on stringent parametric assumptions, do not account for informative censoring due to time-varying covariates when time is continuous, only estimate a marginal survival probability, or do not fully use the discrete-time structure of post-treatment covariates. We propose a nonparametric estimator of the continuous-time survival probability conditional on covariates, accounting for censoring due to time-varying covariates measured on a fixed discrete time scale. We show that the estimator is sequentially doubly robust: it is consistent if, within each time window between adjacent visits, the censoring distribution is consistently estimated, or both the time-to-event distribution and a conditional mean probability are consistently estimated. We also show that, in the special case of estimating the marginal survival probability, our estimator is asymptotically efficient. We demonstrate the superior performance of our estimator in a simulation experiment, and apply the method to a COVID-19 vaccine efficacy trial. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10372 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Sequentially Doubly Robust Estimation of Conditional Survival Probability with Time-Varying Covariates Qiu, Hongxiang Carone, Marco Luedtke, Alex Gilbert, Peter B. Methodology It is often of interest to study the association between covariates and the cumulative incidence of a right-censored time-to-event outcome. When time-varying covariates are measured on a fixed discrete time scale, it is desirable to account for these more up-to-date covariates when addressing censoring. For example, in vaccine trials, it is of interest to study the association between immune response levels after administering the vaccine and the cumulative incidence of the endpoint, while accounting for loss to follow-up explained by immune response levels measured at multiple post-vaccination visits. Existing methods rely on stringent parametric assumptions, do not account for informative censoring due to time-varying covariates when time is continuous, only estimate a marginal survival probability, or do not fully use the discrete-time structure of post-treatment covariates. We propose a nonparametric estimator of the continuous-time survival probability conditional on covariates, accounting for censoring due to time-varying covariates measured on a fixed discrete time scale. We show that the estimator is sequentially doubly robust: it is consistent if, within each time window between adjacent visits, the censoring distribution is consistently estimated, or both the time-to-event distribution and a conditional mean probability are consistently estimated. We also show that, in the special case of estimating the marginal survival probability, our estimator is asymptotically efficient. We demonstrate the superior performance of our estimator in a simulation experiment, and apply the method to a COVID-19 vaccine efficacy trial. |
| title | Sequentially Doubly Robust Estimation of Conditional Survival Probability with Time-Varying Covariates |
| topic | Methodology |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10372 |