A cure rate survival model under a hybrid latent activation scheme

In lifetimes studies, the occurrence of an event (such as tumor detection or death) might be caused by one of many competing causes. Moreover, both the number of causes and the time-to-event associated with each cause are not usually observable. The number of causes can be zero, corresponding to a cure fraction. In this article, we propose a method of estimating the numerical characteristics of unobservable stages (such as initiation, promotion …