Joint Model for Longitudinal and Survival Data

The joint model for longitudinal and time-to-event data, formalised by Tsiatis and Davidian in 2004 and extended comprehensively by Rizopoulos in 2012, simultaneously estimates a mixed-effects model for repeatedly measured biomarkers and a survival model for the time to an event, linking the two processes through shared random effects. It resolves two major problems that simpler approaches cannot handle: informative dropout from longitudinal studies and the endogeneity of time-varying biomarkers used as covariates in a Cox model.