- Jan Nielsen: Southern Center for National Clinical Databases, Odense University Hospital, Sdr. Boulevard 29, Entrance 101, 3rd floor, DK-5000 Odense C, Denmark. jan.nielsen2@ouh.regionsyddanmark.dk
In this paper, we model multivariate time-to-event data by composite likelihood of pairwise frailty likelihoods and marginal hazards using natural cubic splines. Both right- and interval-censored data are considered. The suggested approach is applied on two types of family studies using the gamma- and stable frailty distribution: The first study is on adoption data where the association between survival in families of adopted children and their adoptive and biological parents is studied. The second study is a cross-sectional study of the occurrence of back and neck pain in twins, illustrating the methodology in the context of genetic epidemiology.