Date of Award:

5-1998

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Mathematics and Statistics

Committee Chair(s)

Olcay Akman

Committee

Olcay Akman

Committee

Richard Cutler

Committee

Joe Koebbe

Abstract

When analyzing data in a survival setting, whether of people or objects, one of the assumptions made is that the population is homogeneous. This is not true in reality and certain adjustments can be made in the model to account for heterogeneity. Frailty is one method of dealing with some of this heterogeneity. It is not possible to measure frailty directly and hence it can be very difficult to determine which frailty model is appropriate for the data in interest. This thesis investigates three model selection methods in their effectiveness at determining which frailty distribution best describes a given set of data. The model selection methods used are the Bayes factor, neural networks, and classification trees. Results favored classification trees. Very poor results were observed with neural networks.

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