Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2001/iii/paper-28/4/b/solution

These are separate data, so results from the randomized trial must not be carried over. First inspect the construction of the survival response: a command creating a survival time object must pair follow-up in months with an event indicator, whose death/censoring coding should be checked explicitly. A censoring time is not an observed death time. Stratified product-limit fits would then summarize Kaplan–Meier estimators for the dose groups before adjusted regression.
If the fitted command is a Cox proportional-hazards model with dose, sex and age, its specification is
There is no separate intercept estimate because an intercept is absorbed into the unspecified baseline hazard . With the stated coding, compares high-dose with low-dose death hazards at equal sex and age; compares female with male hazards at equal dose and age; is the hazard multiplier for a one-year age increase. A negative treatment coefficient would correspond to a lower fitted hazard under high dose. A hazard ratio is not a ratio of survival probabilities, nor directly a ratio of survival times. Under this model the survivor function is .
The coefficient standard errors, Wald ratios and exponentiated confidence intervals should be read together. The common large-sample interval for a coefficient's hazard ratio is
Global likelihood-ratio, score and Wald tests assess the included slopes jointly; for exactly these three one-coefficient terms their reference degrees of freedom are three. They need not coincide in a small sample. The Cox partial likelihood uses the event risk sets; the fitted log-likelihood is not a full likelihood for an estimated baseline survival curve. The method for tied event times should be recorded.
Check the proportional hazards assumption using scaled Schoenfeld residuals and time trends; check the functional form of age, influential subjects and independent censoring. Dose-by-age or dose-by-sex interaction terms are scientifically possible but require enough information and a stated model comparison. Adjustment can alter a crude dose association, and the allocation mechanism here is not specified as randomized. No coefficients, confidence limits, significance results, exact fitted calls or diagnostics for this dataset are recoverable without the output sheet. The displayed model is an interpretation template, not a claim that it was the exact missing command.

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