Methods for Informative Censoring in Time-to-Event Data Analysis

In analysis of time-to-event data, subjects prematurely discontinuing from the assigned treatment prior to experiencing an event of interest are often handled by noninformative censoring under censor-at-random assumption. Such methods can be challenged with respect to the robustness of the ignorable or noninformative censoring and sensitivity analyses using informative censoring are often required.In this article, we propose a class of reference-based methods (including Jump to Reference and Copy Reference) and tipping point analysis for time-to-event data with possibly informative censoring. Particularly, the Copy Reference method is a novel method to fit the gap in literature for time-to-event analysis. We further describe and facilitate the implementation of these methods by multiple imputation. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the reference-based methods and tipping point analysis.