A goodness-of-fit test for the marginal Cox model for correlated interval-censored failure time data.

The marginal Cox model approach is perhaps the most commonly used method in the analysis of correlated failure time data (Cai, 1999; Cai and Prentice, 1995; Lin, 1994; Wei, Lin and Weissfeld, 1989). It assumes that the marginal distributions for the correlated failure times can be described by the Cox model and leaves the dependence structure completely unspecified. This paper discusses the assessment of the marginal Cox model for correlated interval-censored data and a goodness-of-fit test is presented for the problem. The method is applied to a set of correlated interval-censored data arising from an AIDS clinical trial.