2017 Theses Doctoral

Marginal Screening on Survival Data

Huang, Tzu Jung

This work develops a marginal screening test to detect the presence of significant predictors for a right-censored time-to-event outcome under a high-dimensional accelerated failure time (AFT) model. Establishing a rigorous screening test in this setting is challenging, not only because of the right censoring, but also due to the post-selection inference. The oracle property in such situations fails to ensure adequate control of the family-wise error rate, and this raises questions about the applicability of standard inferential methods. McKeague and Qian (2015) constructed an adaptive resampling test to circumvent this problem under ordinary linear regression. To accommodate right censoring, we develop a test statistic based on a maximally selected Koul--Susarla--Van Ryzin estimator from a marginal AFT model. A regularized bootstrap method is used to calibrate the test. Our test is more powerful and less conservative than the Bonferroni correction and other competing methods. This proposed method is evaluated in simulation studies and applied to two real data sets.