This book provides a groundbreaking introduction to the likelihood inference for correlated
survival data via the hierarchical (or h-) likelihood in order to obtain the (marginal)
likelihood and to address the computational difficulties in inferences and extensions. The
approach presented in the book overcomes shortcomings in the traditional likelihood-based
methods for clustered survival data such as intractable integration. The text includes
technical materials such as derivations and proofs in each chapter as well as recently
developed software programs in R (¿frailtyHL¿) while the real-world data examples together
with an R package ¿frailtyHL¿ in CRAN provide readers with useful hands-on tools. Reviewing
new developments since the introduction of the h-likelihood to survival analysis (methods for
interval estimation of the individual frailty and for variable selection of the fixed effects
in the general class of frailty models) and guiding future directions the book is of interest
to researchers in medical and genetics fields graduate students and PhD (bio) statisticians.
