Regression analysis of multivariate recurrent event data with time-varying covariate effects

Recurrent event data occur in many fields and many approaches have been proposed for their analyses (Andersen et al. (1993) [1]; Cook and Lawless (2007) [3]). However, most of the available methods allow only time-independent covariate effects, and sometimes this may not be true. In this paper, we consider regression analysis of multivariate recurrent event data in which some covariate effects may be time-dependent. For the problem, we employ the marginal modeling approach and, especially, estimating equation-based inference procedures are developed. Both asymptotic and finite-sample properties of the proposed estimates are established and an illustrative example is provided.