EM Algorithm-Based Likelihood Estimation for Some Cure Rate Models

In the recent work of Rodrigues et al. (2009), a flexible cure rate survival model was developed by assuming the number of competing causes of the event of interest to follow the Conway-Maxwell Poisson distribution. This model includes as special cases some of the well-known cure rate models discussed in the literature. As the data obtained from cancer clinical trials are often subject to right censoring, the expectation maximization (EM) …