Estimating mean cost using auxiliary covariates.

We study the estimation of mean medical cost when censoring is dependent and a large amount of auxiliary information is present. Under missing at random assumption, we propose semiparametric working models to obtain low-dimensional summarized scores. An estimator for the mean total cost can be derived nonparametrically conditional on the summarized scores. We show that when either the two working models for cost-survival process or the model for censoring distribution is correct, the estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal. Small-sample performance of the proposed method is evaluated via simulation studies. Finally, our approach is applied to analyze a real data set in health economics.