One of the commonly used approaches to capture dependence in multivariate survival data is through the frailty variables. The identifiability issues should be carefully investigated while modeling multivariate survival with or without competing risks. The use of non-parametric frailty distribution(s) is sometimes preferred for its robustness and flexibility properties. In this paper, we consider modeling of bivariate survival data with competing risks through four different kinds of non-parametric frailty and parametric baseline cause-specific hazard functions to investigate the corresponding model identifiability. We make the common assumption of the frailty mean being equal to unity.

翻译：在多元生存数据中，捕捉相依性的一种常用方法是通过脆弱变量。无论是否考虑竞争风险，在建立多元生存模型时，都应仔细研究可识别性问题。非参数化脆弱分布因其稳健性和灵活性有时更受青睐。本文考虑通过四种不同类型的非参数化脆弱性与参数化基线原因别风险函数，对具有竞争风险的双变量生存数据进行建模，以研究相应模型的可识别性。我们采用了脆弱性均值等于1的常见假设。