Restricted Mean Survival Time Estimation Using Bayesian Nonparametric Dependent Mixture Models

Abstract: Restricted mean survival time (RMST) is an intuitive summary statistic for time-to-event random variables, and can be used for measuring treatment effects. Compared to hazard ratio, its estimation procedure is robust against the non-proportional hazards assumption. We propose nonparametric Bayeisan (BNP) estimators for RMST using a dependent stick-breaking process prior mixture model that adjusts for mixed-type covariates. The proposed Bayesian estimators can yield both group-level causal estimate and subject-level predictions. Besides, we propose a novel dependent stick-breaking process prior that on average results in narrower credible intervals while maintaining similar coverage probability compared to a dependent probit stick-breaking process prior. We conduct simulation studies to investigate the performance of the proposed BNP RMST estimators compared to existing frequentist approaches and under different Bayesian modeling choices. The proposed framework is applied to estimate the treatment effect of an immuno therapy among KRAS wild-type colorectal cancer patients.