×

Flexible Bayesian additive joint models with an application to type 1 diabetes research. (English) Zbl 1379.62073

Summary: The joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data is an important tool of growing popularity to gain insights into the association between a biomarker and an event process. We develop a general framework of flexible additive joint models that allows the specification of a variety of effects, such as smooth nonlinear, time-varying and random effects, in the longitudinal and survival parts of the models. Our extensions are motivated by the investigation of the relationship between fluctuating disease-specific markers, in this case autoantibodies, and the progression to the autoimmune disease type 1 diabetes. Using Bayesian P-splines, we are in particular able to capture highly nonlinear subject-specific marker trajectories as well as a time-varying association between the marker and event process allowing new insights into disease progression. The model is estimated within a Bayesian framework and implemented in the R-package bamlss.

MSC:

62P10 Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis
62M10 Time series, auto-correlation, regression, etc. in statistics (GARCH)

Software:

bamlss; R
PDFBibTeX XMLCite
Full Text: DOI arXiv