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A comparison of various rate functions of a recurrent event process in the presence of aterminal event

¹ Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, 420Delaware St. SE, MMC 303, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
² Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD21205, USA
³ Biostatistics Research Branch, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892,USA

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed.

	Abstract

Several different rate functions of the recurrent event process have been proposed for analysing recurrent event data when the observation of a study subject can be terminated by a failure event, such as death. When the terminal event is correlated with the underlying recurrent event process, these rate functions have different interpretations; however, recognition of the differences has been lacking theoretically and practically. In this article, we study the relationship between these rate functions and demonstrate that models based on an inappropriate rate function may lead to misleading scientific conclusions in various scenarios. An analysis of data from an AIDS clinical trial is presented to emphasise the importance of cautious model selection.

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