Maximum penalized likelihood estimation of additive hazards models with partly interval censoring

Existing likelihood methods for the additive hazards model with interval censored survival data are limited and often ignore the non-negative constraints on hazards. This paper proposes a maximum penalized likelihood method to fit additive hazards models with interval censoring. Our method firstly models the baseline hazard using a finite number of non-negative basis functions, and then regression coefficients and baseline hazard are estimated simultaneously by maximizing a penalized log-likelihood function, where a penalty function is introduced to regularize the baseline hazard estimate. In the estimation procedure, non-negative constraints are imposed on both the baseline hazard and the hazard of each subject. A primal–dual interior-point algorithm is applied to solve the constrained optimization problem. Asymptotic properties are obtained and a simulation study is conducted for assessment of the proposed method.