A defective cure rate quantile regression model for male breast cancer data.

Abstract

In this article, we particularly address the problem of assessing the impact of different prognostic factors, such as clinical stage and age, on the specific survival times of men with breast cancer when cure is a possibility. To this end, we developed a quantile regression model for survival data in the presence of long-term survivors based on the generalized Gompertz distribution in a defective version, which is conveniently reparametrized in terms of the q-th quantile and then linked to covariates via a logarithm link function. This proposal allows us to obtain how each variable affects the survival times in different quantiles. In addition, we are able to study the effects of covariates on the cure rate as well. We consider Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to develop a Bayesian analysis in the proposed model and we evaluate its performance through Monte Carlo simulation studies. Finally, we illustrate the application of our model in a data set about male breast cancer from Brazil analyzed for the very first time.