Bayesian test for hazard ratio in survival analysis

Abstract

Over the decades, testing for equivalence of hazard functions has received a wide attention in survival analysis. In this paper, we proposed a Bayesian test to address this testing equivalence problem, Most of all, proposed test is methodologically flexible so that a procedure determining weights is not required when the proportional assumption is violated. In comparison with popularly exploited methods, the proposed test is shown to be more powerful and robust in testing differences of hazard functions, in spite of the presence of crossing hazard functions. Extensive applications to simulation and real data were conducted, demonstrating that the proposed test presents outstanding performance and hold desirable properties in terms of numerical aspects.