Likelihood Inference for Flexible Cure Rate Models with Gamma Lifetimes

A flexible cure rate survival model was developed by Rodrigues et al. (2009a) by assuming the competing cause variable to follow the Conway-Maxwell Poisson distribution. This model includes as special cases some of the well-known cure rate models. As the data obtained from cancer clinical trials are often right censored, the EM algorithm can be efficiently used to estimate the model parameters based on right censored data. In this paper, we …