Regression analysis of right-censored failure time data with missing censoring indicators

This paper discusses regression analysis of right-censored failure time data when censoring indicators are missing for some subjects. Several methods have been developed for the analysis under different situations and especially, Goetghebeur and Ryan[4] considered the situation where both the failure time and the censoring time follow the proportional hazards models marginally and developed an estimating equation approach. One limitation of their approach is that the two baseline hazard functions were assumed to be proportional to each other. We consider the same problem and present an efficient estimation procedure for regression parameters that does not require the proportionality assumption. An EM algorithm is developed and the method is evaluated by a simulation study, which indicates that the proposed methodology performs well for practical situations. An illustrative example is provided.