{"doi":"10.1111/biom.13237","title":"On the empirical choice of the time window for restricted mean survival time","abstract":"The t-year mean survival or restricted mean survival time (RMST) has been used as an appealing summary of the survival distribution within a time window [0, t]. RMST is the patient's life expectancy until time t and can be estimated nonparametrically by the area under the Kaplan-Meier curve up to t. In a comparative study, the difference or ratio of two RMSTs has been utilized to quantify the between-group-difference as a clinically interpretable alternative summary to the hazard ratio. The choice of the time window [0, t] may be prespecified at the design stage of the study based on clinical considerations. On the other hand, after the survival data have been collected, the choice of time point t could be data-dependent. The standard inferential procedures for the corresponding RMST, which is also data-dependent, ignore this subtle yet important issue. In this paper, we clarify how to make inference about a random \"parameter.\" Moreover, we demonstrate that under a rather mild condition on the censoring distribution, one can make inference about the RMST up to t, where t is less than or even equal to the largest follow-up time (either observed or censored) in the study. This finding reduces the subjectivity of the choice of t empirically. The proposal is illustrated with the survival data from a primary biliary cirrhosis study, and its finite sample properties are investigated via an extensive simulation study.","journal":"Biometrics","year":2020,"id":53742,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":112,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9285,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":276465,"name":"Hua Jin","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":53979,"name":"Hajime Uno","orcid":"0000-0003-0622-8471","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":50832,"name":"Ying Lü","orcid":"0000-0002-7698-8962","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":274780,"name":"Bo Huang","orcid":"0000-0002-3088-9328","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":274781,"name":"Keaven M. Anderson","orcid":"0000-0003-3218-1363","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":274782,"name":"L. J. Wei","orcid":"0000-0002-8582-920X","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":51246,"name":"Lü Tian","orcid":"0000-0002-5893-0169","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":26,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T20:45:25.145885Z","pmid":"32061098","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}