Extension of the Mantel-Haenszel test to bivariate interval censored data

Abstract

This article presents an independence test between pairs of interval censored failure times. The Mantel-Haenszel test is commonly applied to test the independence between two categorical variables accompanied with a strata variable. Hsu and Prentice (1996) applied a Mantel-Haenszel test to the sequence of 2 x 2 tables formed at the grids which are composed of failure times. In this article, due to unknown failure times, the suitable grid points should be determined and the status of failure and at risk are estimated at those grid points. We also consider a weighted test statistic to bring a more powerful test. Simulation studies are performed to evaluate the power of test statistics under finite samples. The method is applied to analyze two real data sets, mastitis data from milk cows and an age-related eye disease study.