A non-mixture cure rate model for analyzing the survival lifetimes of cardiovascular heart failure patients

Abstract

The present study considers non-mixture models based on the discrete Burr XIII distribution to model recurrent event data in the presence of a cure fraction. In this context, we provide an alternative to the standard Cox proportional hazards model using a discretized distribution to analyze lifetime data assuming a non-mixture structure for cure rates. In a Bayesian setting, the proposed methodology was considered for analyzing a real dataset from a retrospective cohort study that aimed to evaluate specific clinical conditions that affect the lifetimes of 299 heart failure patients admitted to the Institute of Cardiology and Allied Hospital – Faisalabad, Pakistan (April-December, 2015). The model validation process was addressed using the Cox-Snell residuals, which allowed us to identify the suitability of the proposed non-mixture cure rate model.