Asymptotics on semiparametric analysis of multivariate failure time data under the additive hazards model

Many survival studies record the times to two or more distinct failures on each subject. The failures may be events of different natures or may be repetitions of the same kind of event. In this article, we consider the regression analysis of such multivariate failure time data under the additive hazards model. Simple weighted estimating functions for the regression parameters are proposed, and asymptotic distribution theory of the resulting estimators are derived. In addition, a class of generalized Wald and generalized score statistics for hypothesis testing and model selection are presented, and the asymptotic properties of these statistics are examined. © Springer-Verlag 2005.