Testing independent censoring for longitudinal data.

A common problem associated with longitudinal studies is the dropouts of subjects or censoring before the end of follow-up. In most existing methods, it is assumed that censoring is noninformative about missed responses. This assumption is crucial to the validity of many statistical procedures. We develop some nonparametric hypothesis testing procedures to test for independent censoring in the absence/presence of covariates. The test statistics are constructed by contrasting two estimators of the conditional mean of cumulative responses for each stratum of covariate space from sample subsets with different patterns of censoring. Our method does not require the modelling of longitudinal response processes, therefore is robust to model misspecifications. A diagnostic plot procedure is also developed that can be used to identify dependent censoring to certain covariate strata. The finite sample performances of the tests are investigated through extensive simulation studies. The potential of our methods is demonstrated through the application of the tests to a chronic granulomatous disease study.