Abstract
This paper develops an empirical likelihood approach to testing for the presence of uniform stochastic ordering (or hazard rate ordering) among univariate distributions based on independent random samples from each distribution. The proposed test statistic is formed by integrating a localized empirical likelihood statistic with respect to the empirical distribution of the pooled sample. The asymptotic null distribution of this test statistic is found to have a simple distribution-free representation in terms of standard Brownian motion. The approach is extended to the case of right-censored survival data via multiple imputation. Two applications are discussed: (1) uncensored survival time data of mice exposed to radiation, and (2) right-censored time-to-infection data from a human HIV vaccine trial comparing a placebo group with a vaccine group.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Akritas, M. G. (1986). Bootstrapping the Kaplan–Meier estimator. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 81, 1032–1038.
Andersen, P. K., Borgan, Ø., Gill, R. D., Keiding, N. (1982). Linear nonparametric tests for comparison of counting processes, with application to censored survival data (with discussion). International Statistical Review, 50, 219–258.
Andersen, P. K., Borgan, Ø., Gill, R. D., Keiding, N. (1993). Statistical models based on counting processes. New York: Springer.
Arcones, M. A., Samaniego, F. J. (2000). On the asymptotic distribution theory of a class of consistent estimators of a distribution satisfying a uniform stochastic ordering constraint. The Annals of Statistics, 28, 116–1150.
Billingsley, P. (1968). Convergence of probability measures. New York: Wiley.
Duerr, A., Huang, Y., Buchbinder, S., Coombs, R. W., Sanchez, J., del Rio, C., Casapia, M., Santiago, S., Gilbert, P., Corey, L., Robertson, M. N., for the Step/HVTN 504 Study Team. (2012). Extended follow-up confirms early vaccine-enhanced risk of HIV acquisition and demonstrates waning effect over time among participants in a randomized trial of recombinant adenovirus HIV vaccine (Step Study). The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 206, 258–266.
Dykstra, R., Kochar, S., Robertson, T. (1991). Statistical inference for uniform stochastic ordering in several populations. The Annals of Statistics, 19, 870–888.
Einmahl, J. H. J., McKeague, I. W. (2003). Empirical likelihood based hypothesis testing. Bernoulli, 9, 267–290.
El Barmi, H., McKeague, I. W. (2013). Empirical likelihood based tests for stochastic ordering. Bernoulli, 19, 295–307.
El Barmi, H., Mukerjee, H. (2013). Consistent estimation of survival functions under uniform stochastic ordering; the \(k\)-sample case. (Submitted for publication).
Hoel, D. G. (1972). A representation of mortality data by competing risks. Biometrics, 28, 475–488.
Kosorok, M. R. (2008). Introduction to empirical processes and semiparametric inference. New York: Springer.
Ledwina, T., Wyłupek, G. (2012). Nonparametric tests for stochastic ordering. TEST, 21, 730–756.
Ledwina, T., Wyłupek, G. (2014). Tests for first-order stochastic dominance. http://www.impan.pl/Preprints/p746. (Preprint).
Lehmann, E. L. (1955). Ordered families of distributions. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 26, 399–419.
Mukerjee, H. (1996). Estimation of survival functions under uniform stochastic ordering. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 91, 1684–1689.
Owen, A. B. (1988). Empirical likelihood ratio confidence intervals for a single functional. Biometrika, 75, 237–249.
Owen, A. B. (1990). Empirical likelihood ratio confidence regions. The Annals of Statistics, 18, 90–120.
Reid, N. (1981). Estimating the median survival time. Biometrika, 68, 601–608.
Robertson, T., Wright, F. T., Dykstra, R. L. (1988). Order restricted inferences. New York: Wiley.
Rojo, J., Samaniego, F. J. (1991). On nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a distribution uniformly stochastically smaller than a standard. Statistics and Probability Letters, 11, 267–271.
Rojo, J., Samaniego, F. J. (1993). On estimating a survival curve subject to a uniform stochastic ordering constraint. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 88, 566–572.
Schmid, F., Trede, M. (1996). Testing for first-order stochastic dominance: A new distribution-free test. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series D (The Statistician), 45, 371–380.
Shaked, M., Shanthikumar, J. G. (2006). Stochastic orders. New York: Springer.
Tarone, R. (1975). Tests for trend in life table analysis. Biometrika, 62, 679–682.
Tarone, R., Ware, J. (1977). On distribution free tests for equality of survival distributions. Biometrika, 64, 156–160.
Taylor, J. M. G., Murray, S., Hsu, C.-H. (2002). Survival estimation and testing via multiple imputation. Statistics and Probability Letters, 58, 221–232.
Thomas, D., Grunkemeir, G. (1975). Confidence interval estimation of survival probabilities for censored data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 70, 865–871.
van der Vaart, A. W., Wellner, J. A. (1996). Weak convergence and empirical processes with applications to statistics. New York: Springer.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the associate editor and two referees for their helpful comments. The authors thank also Peter Gilbert for helpful advice on using data from the Step Study and Ørnulf Borgan for help in providing R code for the Tarone–Ware statistic. The work of Ian McKeague was partially supported by NIH Grant R01GM095722-01 and NSF Grant DMS-1307838 and the work of Hammou El Barmi was partially supported by The City University of New York through a PSC-CUNY Grant.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
El Barmi, H., McKeague, I.W. Testing for uniform stochastic ordering via empirical likelihood. Ann Inst Stat Math 68, 955–976 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10463-015-0523-z
Received:
Revised:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10463-015-0523-z