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ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2008/iii/paper-46/4/b/ii/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 46 4 b ii Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Cohort A alone would give . But two-year survival is the product of first-year survival and conditional survival through the second year. Cohort B contributes a full year's information to the first factor even though it has no second-year follow-up. Omitting it discards useful early deaths and survivors. The pooled estimate combines the first-year information from both cohorts with the conditional second-year information from cohort A.
Thus lack of two-year follow-up is handled by censoring, not by removing the entire short-follow-up cohort. This is cohort pooling under administrative censoring. The criticism assumes comparable time-since-entry survival distributions: if enrolment cohort or calendar period genuinely changes the hazard, naive pooling is not justified. One should model or stratify that effect, and an estimand specifically restricted to cohort A may appropriately use its own survival distribution.
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