Skip to content
Prev 366807 / 398502 Next

separate mixture of gamma and normal (with mixtools or ??)

In survival analysis of cancer cases, the question of cure comes up often. Physicians sometimes have a naive notion of survival to 5 years after definitive treatment with no evident recurrence being equivalent to 'cure', despite the fact that there is great heterogeneity in the recurrence and survival distribution of different cancer types. I have see papers in the medical statistical literature that used mixtures of Weibull variates to model this problem. The cancer-specific survival is often exponential (mu=1) or "sub-exponential" (shape < 1) whereas non-cancer survival times are "super-exponential" (shape >> 1). When I ran your second simulation with dist='weibull' I get:
Parameters:
      pi     mu  sigma
1 0.2492  1.016 0.8702
2 0.7508 20.079 4.2328

Standard Errors:
     pi.se   mu.se sigma.se
1 0.009683 0.04249  0.05137
2 0.009683 0.10972  0.06802


Analysis of Variance Table

          Df  Chisq Pr(>Chisq)    
Residuals 29 80.407   1.01e-06 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ?***? 0.001 ?**? 0.01 ?*? 0.05 ?.? 0.1 ? ? 1
pi        mu     sigma
1 0.2492477  1.016319 0.8702055
2 0.7507523 20.079093 4.2327769

So the exponential parameter at least is well-estimated. I believe that Weibull variates with  shape >> 1 are approximately normal, but I know that your mathematical sophistication exceeds mine by quite a bit, so consider this only a dilettante's comment.