Auxiliary for Starting iCoxph Fitting

Auxiliary function for iCoxph that enable users to specify the starting values of the model estimation procedure.

iCoxph.start(
  beta_vec = NULL,
  beta_mat = NULL,
  methods = c("nearest_hazard", "unit_hazard"),
  ...
)

Arguments

beta_vec	A numeric vector for starting values of coefficient estimates. The default values are the coefficient estimates from the regular Cox model only fitting on records without uncertainty. If censoring rate among subjects having unique certain records is extremely high (> 99 indicator and one predictor, the starting values will be reset to be all zeros.
beta_mat	A numeric matrix that consists of additional starting values of coefficient estimates in columns. The default value is `NULL`.
methods	A character vector specifying the initialization methods for probabilities of uncertain records being true. The available methods are `"nearest_hazard"` for initializing baseline hazard by nearest (left) neighbor, and `"unit_hazard"` for initializing unit baseline hazard. Partial matching on method names is supported for ease of typing. By default, both methods are used. See Wang et al. (2020) for details of the initialization methods.
...	Other arguments for future usage. A warning will be thrown if any invalid argument is specified.

A list of class intsurv-iCoxph.start containing all specified starting values of the parameters to be estimated from the model.

## See examples of function 'iCoxph'.