Consider a life testing situation in which systems are subject to failure from independent competing risks. The hazards of various risks are proportional to each other. When a failure occurs, if immediate (stage-1) procedures fail to result in a definitive diagnosis, this phenomenon is called masking. Stage-2 procedures, such as failure analysis or autopsy, provide definitive diagnosis for a sample of the masked cases. This article shows how stage-1 and stage-2 information can be combined to provide statistical inference aobut (a) survival functions of the individual risks, (b) the proportions of failures associated with individual risks and (c) probability, for a specified mask case, that each of the masked competing risks is responsible for the failure.
By: Betty J. Flehinger, Benjamin Reiser and Emmanuel Yashchin
Published in: Biometrika, volume 85, (no 1), pages 151-64 in 1998
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