Additive Hazards Regression Analysis of Massive Interval-Censored Data via Data Splitting

With the rapid development of data acquisition and storage space, massive datasets exhibited with large sample size emerge increasingly and make more advanced statistical tools urgently need. To accommodate such big volume in the analysis, a variety of methods have been proposed in the circumstances of complete or right censored survival data. However, existing development of big data methodology has not attended to interval-censored outcomes, which are ubiquitous in cross-sectional or periodical follow-up studies. In this work, we propose an easily implemented divide-and-combine approach for analyzing massive interval-censored survival data under the additive hazards model. We establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator, including the consistency and asymptotic normality. In addition, the divide-and-combine estimator is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the full-data-based estimator obtained from analyzing all data together. Simulation studies suggest that, relative to the full-data-based approach, the proposed divide-and-combine approach has desirable advantage in terms of computation time, making it more applicable to large-scale data analysis. An application to a set of interval-censored data also demonstrates the practical utility of the proposed method.