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It is a nonparametric test and appropriate to use when the data are right skewed and censored (technically, the censoring must be non-informative). It is widely used in clinical trials to establish the efficacy of a new treatment compared to a control treatment when the measurement is the time to event (such as the time from initial treatment to a heart attack). The test is sometimes called the MantelCox test, named after Nathan Mantel and David Cox. The logrank test can also be viewed as a time stratified CochranMantelHaenszel test. The test was first proposed by Nathan Mantel and was named the logrank test by Richard and Julian Peto.[1][2][3]
Contents
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1 Definition 2 Asymptotic distribution 3 Joint distribution 4 Relationship to other statistics 5 See also 6 References 7 External links
normal with mean , the sample size required is of the standard normal distribution.
and and correlation . Calculations involving the joint distribution are needed to correctly maintain the error rate when the data are examined multiple times within a study by a Data Monitoring Committee.
The logrank test has been shown to be too permissive a test, allowing significant results for survivorship prediction models that have low accuracy. The F* test was developed in response to these observations and has been shown to be more critical and to track accuracy of the prediction models with higher fidelity.[5] The logrank statistic can be derived as the score test for the Cox proportional hazards model comparing two groups. It is therefore asymptotically equivalent to the likelihood ratio test statistic based from that model. The logrank statistic is asymptotically equivalent to the likelihood ratio test statistic for any family of distributions with proportional hazard alternative. For example, if the data from the two samples have exponential distributions.
If
is the estimate
of the hazard ratio, then . This relationship is useful when two of the quantities are known (e.g. from a published article), but the third one is needed.
The logrank statistic can be used when observations are censored. If censored observations are not present in the data then the Wilcoxon rank sum test is appropriate. The logrank statistic gives all calculations the same weight, regardless of the time at which an event occurs. The Peto logrank statistic gives more weight to earlier events when there are a large number of observations.