Conditional quasi‐likelihood inference for mean residual life regression with clustered failure time data

Abstract In the analysis of clustered failure time data, Cox frailty models have been extensively studied by incorporating frailty with a prespecified distribution to address potential correlation of data within clusters. In this paper, we propose a frailty proportional mean residual life regression model to analyze such data. A novel conditional quasi‐likelihood inference procedure is developed, utilizing a stochastic process and the inverse probability of censoring weighting (IPCW) to form estimating equations for regression parameters. Our proposal employs conditional inference based on a penalized quasi‐likelihood to address within‐cluster correlation without need to specify the frailty distribution, bringing the method closer to what suffices for real‐world applications. By adopting the Buckley–James estimator in the IPCW, the method further allows for dependent censoring. We establish asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator and evaluate its finite sample performance via simulation studies. An application to the data from a multi‐institutional breast cancer study is presented for illustration.