SHUAI CHEN 
PhD Candidate, Department of Statistics
Texas A&M University
“Statistical Inference for Medical Costs with Censored Data”
ABSTRACT
Cost-effectiveness analysis is widely conducted in the economic evaluation of new medical treatments. Censored costs data poses a unique problem for cost estimation due to “induced informative censoring” problem. Thus, many standard approaches for survival analysis are not valid for the analysis of cost data. We first study how to intuitively explain some existing mean cost estimators, based on the generalized redistribute-to-the-right algorithm. Then we derive the confidence interval for the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for a special case, when terminating events are different for survival time and costs. Finally, we present two improved survival estimators of costs, which are motivated by the idea of generalized redistribute-to-the-right algorithm and kernel method. The simulation studies and real data example show that our methods perform very well for some practical settings.
