# Including Splines in Piecewise Constant Hazard Regression This function can be used within a call to `pchreg` to automatically include spline functions in the linear predictor of the model. ```r splinex(method = c("ns", "bs"), df = 2, degree = 2, v = 0.98, ...) ``` ## Arguments - `method`: a character string indicating whether natural splines (`ns`) or B-splines (`bs`) should be used. Default is ‘ns’ . - `df`: the degrees of freedom of the spline basis. - `degree`: the degree of the polynomial (only for `bs`). - `v`: a value between 0 and 1 determining how many principal components of the design matrix must be used in model fitting (see Details ). - ``: for future arguments. ## Details The piecewise constant hazard model implemented by `pchreg` can be used as a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator, in which the number of parameters is allowed to increase with the sample size in order to achieve any desired flexibility. Modeling the effect of covariates is as important as setting a sufficiently large number of `breaks`. By letting `splinex = splinex(...)`, each column of the original design matrix is automatically replaced by the corresponding spline basis, defined by `method`, `df`, and `degree`. This modeling approach has the drawback of generating a potentially large design matrix. To reduce its dimension, select `v < 1`. With this option, the original design matrix will be converted into principal components, and only the PCs explaining at least a proportion `v` of the variance will be used to fit the model (see Examples ). ## Returns The function returns its arguments, to be passed to an internal function `build.splinex` that actually computes the design matrix. ## Author(s) Paolo Frumento ## Note A multidimensional spline can be created by including a tensor product of splines, e.g., `ns(x1,df)*ns(x2,df)`. This is not supported by splinex , as it may generate a very large design matrix. ## See Also `pchreg` ## Examples ```r require(splines) n <- 1000 x1 <- runif(n,-2,2) x2 <- runif(n,-2,2) t <- rexp(n, exp(-abs(x1 - x2))) # a simple model model1 <- pchreg(Surv(t) ~ x1 + x2) # using splinex: the same as ~ ns(x1, df = 2) + ns(x2, df = 2) model2 <- pchreg(Surv(t) ~ x1 + x2, splinex = splinex("ns", v = 1)) # include interaction: ~ ns(x1, df = 2) + ns(x2, df = 2) + ns(x1*x2, df = 2) model3 <- pchreg(Surv(t) ~ x1 * x2, splinex = splinex("ns", v = 1)) # the same as model 3, only keep the PCs explaining at least 95 percent of the variance model4 <- pchreg(Surv(t) ~ x1 * x2, splinex = splinex("ns", v = 0.95)) # true CDF vs fitted trueF <- pexp(t, exp(-abs(x1 - x2))) par(mfrow = c(2,2)) plot(trueF, 1 - predict(model1)$Surv); abline(0,1, col = "red", lwd = 2) # does not fit plot(trueF, 1 - predict(model2)$Surv); abline(0,1, col = "red", lwd = 2) # neither plot(trueF, 1 - predict(model3)$Surv); abline(0,1, col = "red", lwd = 2) # great! plot(trueF, 1 - predict(model4)$Surv); abline(0,1, col = "red", lwd = 2) # almost as good ```

splinex function