Robust functional Cox regression model
摘要
Survival analysis with functional covariates has emerged as an important extension of the classical Cox proportional hazards model, allowing one to assess how entire trajectories or curves influence time-to-event outcomes. However, existing functional Cox models are typically fitted using non-robust techniques and can be highly sensitive to outliers or aberrant observations in the data. In this paper, we propose a robust functional Cox regression model that addresses this limitation. The proposed methodology combines a projection-pursuit-based robust functional principal component analysis with robust Cox regression estimation in a finite-dimensional subspace. By adopting the robust functional principal component analysis approach for dimension reduction, we obtain principal components that resist the influence of outlying functional observations. Then, a robust partial likelihood approach which additionally downweights the effects of outliers is used to estimate the parameters of a Cox regression model constructed using the robust functional principal components and scalar covariates. We establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator, including Fisher consistency,