Continuously updated estimation of conditional hazard functions

Abstract: Motivated by the need to analyze continuously updated data sets in the context of time-to-event modeling, we propose a novel nonparametric approach to estimate the conditional hazard function given a set of continuous and discrete predictors. The method is based on a representation of the conditional hazard as a ratio between a joint density and a conditional expectation determined by the distribution of the observed variables. It is shown that such ratio representations are available for uni- and bivariate time-to-events, in the presence of common types of random censoring, truncation, and with possibly cured individuals, as well as for competing risks. This opens the door to nonparametric approaches in many time-to-event predictive models. To estimate joint densities and conditional expectations we propose the recursive kernel smoothing, which is well suited for online estimation. Asymptotic results for such estimators are derived and it is shown that they achieve optimal convergence rates. Simulation experiments show the good finite sample performance of our recursive estimator with right censoring. The method is applied to a real dataset of primary breast cancer.