Event Details

The seminar will be in-person.

Title: Flexible Excess Hazard Modelling with Applications in Cancer Epidemiology

Abstract: Excess hazard modelling is one of the main tools in population-based cancer survival research. This setting allows for direct modelling of the survival due to cancer in the absence of reliable information on the cause of death, which is common in population-based cancer epidemiology studies. We propose a unifying link-based additive modelling framework for the excess hazard that allows for the inclusion of many types of covariate effects, including spatial and time-dependent effects, using any type of smoother, such as thin plate, cubic splines, tensor products and Markov random fields. Three case studies that illustrate the type of applications of interest in practice will be presented. We will conclude with a discussion on available software tools (in R), as well as a general discussion on the use of the relative survival framework.