Investigating the use of the accelerated hazards model for survival analysis

This project contrasts the Proportional Hazards, Accelerated Failure Time and Accelerated Hazards (AH) models in the analysis of time to event data. The AH model handles data that exhibit crossing of the survival and hazard curves, unlike the other two models considered. The three models are illustrated on five contrasting data sets. A simulation study is conducted to assess the small sample performance of the AH model by quantifying the mean squared error of the predicted survivor curves under scenarios of crossing and non-crossing survivor curves. The results show that the AH model can perform poorly under model misspecification for models with a crossing hazard. Problems with variance estimation of parameters in the AH model are observed for small sample sizes and a bootstrap approach is offered as an alternate method of quantifying precision of estimates.