Survival analysis of cancer patients using a new extended Weibull distribution

Abstract

One of the most important applications of statistical analysis is in health research and applications. Cancer studies are mostly required special statistical considerations in order to find the appropriate model for fitting the survival data. Existing classical distributions rarely fit such data well and an increasing interest has been shown recently in developing more flexible distributions by introducing some additional parameters to the basic model. In this paper, a new five-parameters distribution referred as alpha power Kumaraswamy Weibull distribution is introduced and studied. Particularly, this distribution extends the Weibull distribution based on a novel technique that combines two well known generalisation methods, namely, alpha power and T-X transformations. Different characteristics of the proposed distribution, including moments, quantiles, Rényi entropy and order statistics are obtained. The method of maximum likelihood is applied in order to estimate the model parameters based on complete and censored data. The performance of these estimators are examined via conducting some simulation studies. The potential importance and applicability of the proposed distribution is illustrated empirically by means of six datasets that describe the survival of some cancer patients. The results of the analysis indicated to the promising performance of the alpha power Kumaraswamy Weibull distribution in practice comparing to some other competing distributions.