A First Passage Time Model for Long-Term Survivors with Competing Risks

We investigate a competing risks model, using the specification of the Gompertz distribution for failure times from competing causes and the inverse Gaussian distribution for failure times from the cause of interest. The expectation-maximization algorithm is used for parameter estimation and the model is applied to real data on breast cancer and melanoma. In these applications, our models compare favourably with existing techniques. The proposed method provides a useful technique that may be more broadly applicable than existing alternatives.