Efficient Estimation for Linear Transformation Models with Current Status Data

Linear transformation models provide a class of flexible models for regression analysis of failure time data and several methods have been proposed for fitting them to right-censored failure time data (Chen, 2002; Cheng et al., 1995; Yin and Zeng, 2006). This article considers the fitting of these models to current status data, a special type of interval-censored failure time data. We derive the maximum likelihood estimates and their information bound and establish the efficiency of the estimates. Simulation studies show that the approach is appropriate for practical use and an application is given to illustrate the approach.