Survival and lifetime data analysis with a flexible class of distributions

Abstract

We introduce a general class of continuous univariate distributions with positive support obtained by transforming the class of two-piece distributions. We show that this class of distributions is very flexible, easy to implement, and contains members that can capture different tail behaviours and shapes, producing also a variety of hazard functions. The proposed distributions represent a flexible alternative to the classical choices such as the log-normal, Gamma, and Weibull distributions. We investigate empirically the inferential properties of the proposed models through an extensive simulation study. We present some applications using real data in the contexts of time-to-event and accelerated failure time models. In the second kind of applications, we explore the use of these models in the estimation of the distribution of the individual remaining life.