A Class of Two-Sample Nonparametric Tests for Panel Count Data

Panel count data frequently occur in many situations including medical follow-up studies and reliability experiments. For two-sample comparison based on panel count data, several procedures have been proposed including Thall and Lachin (1988 Thall , P. F. , Lachin , J. M. ( 1988 ). Analysis of recurrent events: nonparametric methods for random-interval count data . J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 83 : 339 – 347 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Sun and Fang (2003 Sun , J. , Fang , H. B. ( 2003 ). A nonparametric test for panel count data . Biometrika 90 : 199 – 208 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In this article, a new class of nonparametric test procedures are presented. The test is a generalization of that for the same problem for failure time data and overcomes some shortcomings of the existing methods. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the presented approach and suggest that it works well. An illustrative example is discussed.