Modeling Clustered Interval-Censored Failure Time Data With Informative Cluster Size

We propose two estimating procedures to analyze clustered interval-censored data with an informative cluster size based on a marginal model and investigate their asymptotic properties. One is an extension of Cong et al. (2007) to interval-censored data and the other uses the within-cluster resampling method proposed by Hoffman et al. (2001). Simulation results imply that the proposed estimators have a better performance in terms of bias and coverage rate of true value than an estimator with no adjustment of informative cluster size when the cluster size is related with survival time. Finally, they are applied to lymphatic filariasis data adopted from Williamson et al. (2008).