Generalized mean residual life models for survival data with missing censoring indicators

The mean residual life (MRL) function is an important and attractive alternative to the hazard function for characterizing the distribution of a time-to-event variable. In this article, we study the modeling and inference of a family of generalized MRL models for right-censored survival data with censoring indicators missing at random. To estimate the model parameters, augmented inverse probability weighted estimating equation approaches are developed, in which the non-missingness probability and the conditional probability of an uncensored observation are estimated by parametric methods or nonparametric kernel smoothing techniques. Asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are established and finite sample performance is evaluated by extensive simulation studies. An application to brain cancer data is presented to illustrate the proposed methods.