Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., Friday, March 13, 2026

Host: Professor Zhongyi Zhu, Department of Statistics and Data Science, School of Management

Venue: Room 302, Starr Building

Speaker: Professor Liuquan Sun (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Topic: The Cox-Aalen rate model for recurrent events with an informative terminal event

Abstract:

Recurrent event data arise frequently in many clinical and observational studies. In this article, we propose a Cox-Aalen rate model to analyze recurrent event data with a terminal event, where the covariate effects are additive, time-varying, and dependent on a latent variable nonparametrically. The association between recurrent and terminal events is fully nonparametric, and a proportional hazards model is specified for the terminal event.

To estimate the model parameters, an estimating equation approach is developed and kernel-smoothing techniques are employed to estimate the conditional expectations in the estimating equation.

The asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are derived, and the finite sample performance is evaluated through simulation studies. An application to a medical cost study of chronic heart failure patients is presented.

Speaker Bio:

Liuquan Sun is a Tier-2 Researcher and Doctoral Supervisor at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as the Vice President of the Chinese Association for Applied Statistics, Vice President of the National Association of Industrial Statistics Teaching and Research, Vice President of the Beijing Association for Applied Statistics, and Vice President of the Higher Education Branch of the Chinese Association for Statistical Education. He is also the President of the Resources and Environment Statistics Branch of the Chinese Association for Applied Statistics, and President of the Digital Economy and Blockchain Technology Association under the National Association of Industrial Statistics Teaching and Research.

He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Statistics and Management, Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the Statistics Discipline of the Encyclopedia of China (Third Edition), and an editorial board member for several domestic and international journals. His main research interests include survival analysis, biostatistics, and the statistical analysis of longitudinal data, recurrent event data, and various types of survival data. He has published over 190 high-level academic papers in core domestic and international journals, including top statistics journals such as JASA and Biometrika, the top machine learning journal JMLR, and the top econometrics journal JBES. He is currently leading one Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and has presided over or participated in more than 20 projects, including the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program), as well as Major, Key, and General Programs of the NSFC.