Abstract: Costs assessment and cost-effectiveness analysis serve as an essential part in economic evaluation of medical interventions. In clinical trials and many observational studies, costs as well as survival data are frequently censored. Standard techniques for survival-type data are often invalid in analyzing censored cost data, due to the induced dependent censoring problem (Lin et al., 1997). In this talk, we will first examine the equivalency between a redistribute-to-the right (RR) algorithm and the popular Kaplan-Meier method for estimating the survival function of time (Efron, 1967). Next, we will extend the RR algorithm to the problem of estimating mean costs with censored data, and propose a simple RR (Pfeifer and Bang, 2005) and an efficient RR estimator. We will establish the equivalency between the RR estimators and some existing cost estimators derived from the inverse-probability-weighting technique and semiparametric efficiency theory. Finally, we will extend the RR algorithm to the problem of estimating the survival function of health costs, and conduct simulation studies to compare a new RR survival estimator with some existing survival estimators for costs.
