Survival model induced by discrete frailty for modeling of lifetime data with long-term survivors and change-point

Frailty models are used for modeling heterogeneity in the data analysis of lifetimes. Analysis that ignore frailty when it is present leads to incorrect inferences. In survival analysis, the distribution of frailty is generally assumed to be continuous and, in some cases, it may be appropriate to consider a discrete frailty distribution. Survival models induced by frailty with a continuous distribution are not appropriate for situations in …