The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by dogado GmbH, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider. Check out our Wordpress Tutorial.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]dogado.de.

Reproducing Source Papers with MultiFrailty

Shikhar Tyagi, Arvind Pandey, Bhupendra Singh, Vrijesh Tripathi

2026-07-31

Overview

This vignette illustrates fitting the shared frailty models proposed in:

  1. Pandey, Hanagal, & Tyagi (2022): Shared Frailty Models Based on Cancer Data, IJSRE.
  2. Pandey & Tyagi (2021): Comparison of Multiplicative Frailty Models Under Weibull Baseline Distribution, Lobachevskii J. Math.

Example Fit on Lung Cancer Data

library(MultiFrailty)
library(survival)

# Prepare lung cancer dataset
data(lung, package = "survival")
#> Warning in data(lung, package = "survival"): data set 'lung' not found
lung_clean <- na.omit(lung[, c("time", "status", "age", "sex")])
lung_clean$status <- ifelse(lung_clean$status == 2, 1, 0)
lung_clean$sex <- ifelse(lung_clean$sex == 1, 0, 1)

# Fit Inverse Gaussian (IG) frailty model with Weibull baseline
fit_ig <- multifrailty(Surv(time, status) ~ age + sex, data = lung_clean,
                       baseline = "weibull", frailty = "ig")
summary(fit_ig)
#> 
#> =========================================================
#>  MultiFrailty Regression Model Fit (MLE)
#> =========================================================
#> Baseline Hazard : weibull 
#> Frailty Family  : ig 
#> Sample Size (n) : 228 
#> Log-Likelihood  : -1147 
#> AIC / BIC       : 2304 / 2321.1 
#> Frailty Var (SE): 0.06565 ( 0.2063 )
#> Optimizer       : Converged 
#> ---------------------------------------------------------
#> Parameter Estimates (Natural Scale):
#>        Estimate   StdErr  z_stat p_value     CI_lower      CI_upper Signif
#> lambda 734.8296 334.0457  2.1998  0.0278 80.100044548 1389.55910471      *
#> gamma    1.3617   0.1319 10.3221  0.0000  1.103174008    1.62032319    ***
#> eta      0.0657   0.2063  0.3183  0.7503 -0.338606913    0.46990697       
#> age      0.0162   0.0097  1.6692  0.0951 -0.002825238    0.03526012      .
#> sex     -0.5363   0.1910 -2.8079  0.0050 -0.910575033   -0.16193842     **
#> =========================================================

# Fit Generalized Lindley Type 1 (GL1) frailty model
fit_gl1 <- multifrailty(Surv(time, status) ~ age + sex, data = lung_clean,
                        baseline = "weibull", frailty = "gl1")
summary(fit_gl1)
#> 
#> =========================================================
#>  MultiFrailty Regression Model Fit (MLE)
#> =========================================================
#> Baseline Hazard : weibull 
#> Frailty Family  : gl1 
#> Sample Size (n) : 228 
#> Log-Likelihood  : -1147 
#> AIC / BIC       : 2305.9 / 2326.5 
#> Frailty Var (SE): 0.08478 ( 0.1757 )
#> Optimizer       : Converged 
#> ---------------------------------------------------------
#> Parameter Estimates (Natural Scale):
#>         Estimate   StdErr        z_stat p_value     CI_lower      CI_upper
#> lambda  749.1022 341.8839  2.191100e+00  0.0284 79.009848511 1419.19455451
#> gamma     1.3738   0.1287  1.067660e+01  0.0000  1.121637792    1.62605601
#> eta       0.0848   0.0000  8.478123e+10  0.0000  0.084781230    0.08478123
#> epsilon   0.0848   0.0000  8.478123e+10  0.0000  0.084781230    0.08478123
#> age       0.0170   0.0099  1.728400e+00  0.0839 -0.002281653    0.03633762
#> sex      -0.5464   0.1922 -2.842200e+00  0.0045 -0.923181288   -0.16958850
#>         Signif
#> lambda       *
#> gamma      ***
#> eta        ***
#> epsilon    ***
#> age          .
#> sex         **
#> =========================================================

# Compare candidate models
comp <- compare_models(fit_ig, fit_gl1)
print(comp)
#>     Model Baseline Frailty    logLik K      AIC      BIC     AICc     HQIC
#> 1 Model_1  weibull      ig -1146.984 5 2303.967 2321.114 2304.238 2310.886
#> 2 Model_2  weibull     gl1 -1146.965 6 2305.930 2326.506 2306.310 2314.232
#>   FrailtyVar
#> 1 0.06565003
#> 2 0.08478123

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.