Re: st: intcens: how to estimate mean and variance after intcens

[Steve Samuels <sjsamuels@gmail.com>]

Yoann, The FAQ ask that you state the source of unofficial commands.
-intcens- was written by Jamie Griffin and is available from SSC.

The usual sample descriptive statistics cannot be calculated for
interval-censored data.

One approach is to apply Patrick Royston's command -stpm-, also at SSC,
which fits flexible distributions. You can estimate survival curves and
percentiles of the unconditional as well as covariate-conditional,
distributions. You won't get standard errors for the percentiles, but
you could -bootstrap- these. Means and SDs can be estimated with a lot
more work, but I don't think these are useful descriptive stats for
most survival data problems.

In fact, I recommend -stpm-, not -intcens- for your main analysis. Some
reasons: 1) Both fit parametric models, but -stpm- adapts to the shape
of the distribution, saving you the need to select a "best" theoretical
distribution. 2) -stpm- has excellent postestimtion options; -intcens-
has none. (You can estimate survival curves & statistics starting with
the supplied e(b) matrix, but you must do it by hand.) 3) -stpm- allows
coefficients to vary with time (i.e. time-predictor interactions,);
-intcens- does not.


Steve



On Oct 11, 2012, at 12:35 PM, Yoann Madec wrote:

Dear Stata users,

In order to describe the time to an event I used the command intcens. Indeed, for all my subjects, I know that the event took place within a time-interval, but do not have thje exact date.

Using intcens, I vcan test whether some factors influence this time to event.

However, I would like to summarize the time to event and provide a confidence interval for this time.
I have not been able to fin how to estimate a mean and variance after intcens.

i hope that someone will be able to help.

Best regards,

Yoann

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