Publication
Fitting parametric cure models in R using the packages cuRe and rstpm2
Publisher:
Elsevier BV
Date:
11-2022
DOI:
10.1016/J.CMPB.2022.107125
Abstract: Within medical research, cure models are useful for analyzing time-to-event data in the scenario where a proportion of the analyzed in iduals are expected to never experience the event of interest. Cure models are also useful for modelling the relative survival in scenarios where a proportion of the in iduals are expected to eventually experience a mortality rate similar to that of the general population. Here we present two R packages, cuRe and rstpm2, that provide researchers with several tools for performing statistical inference using parametric cure models. Cure models are commonly used to estimate 1) the proportion of in iduals that are cured and 2) the event-time distribution of in iduals who are not cured. This can be done using simple parametric distributions for the event-time distribution of the uncured, but our implementations also enable fitting of more flexible spline-based cure models. The parametric framework of both packages ensures that cure models for the relative survival can easily be used. The cuRe package contains two main functions for estimating parametric mixture cure models one based on simple parametric distributions (e.g. Weibull or exponential) and one utilizing a spline-based formulation of the cure model. The rstpm2 package enables estimation of spline-based latent cure models, i.e., cure models with no explicit parameters modelling the proportion of cured in iduals. Through the R-packages cuRe and rstpm2, a wide range of different parametric cure models can be fitted. The cuRe package also contains a number of useful post-estimation procedures for computing the time to statistical cure and conditional probability of cure, which may spread the use of cure models in medical research.