A Minitab Macro for the Kaplan-Meier Product Limit Estimator and the Tarone-Ware Class of Tests.
Abstract
Minitab is a user-friendly statistical computer package widely used in industry and academia. The Kaplan-Meier ple and the Tarone-Ware class of tests are often used in biostatistics and reliability theory to compare two survival distributions. The Tarone-Ware class of tests is generated by allowing the power of the sample size to run from zero (inclusive) up to and including one. The value 0 corresponds to the Mantel-Haenszel test, .5 to the Tarone-Ware and 1 to the Tarone-Ware version of Gehan's test. This power parameter is specified by the user in the MINITAB constant k4. Miller asserts that the Tarone-Ware class of tests allows the censoring distributions to be different, while Gehan's test does not. However, he also cites evidence that Gehan's tests appears to be insensitive to differences in censoring distributions, so it is not clear which test should be used. A MINITAB macro to calculate Gehan's test has been given by Soms. The main idea of the program is to first break ties between censored and completed observations by adding to the censored observations one-half of the smallest non-zero difference for the ordered combined observations. This does not change the K-M ple or Tarone-Ware tests.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA194298
Entities
People
- Andrew P. Soms
Organizations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison