Extension of Mood’s median test for survival data

Mood’s median test for testing the equality of medians is a nonparametric approach, which has been widely used for uncensored data in practice. For survival data, many nonparametric methods have been proposed to test for the equality of survival curves. However, if the survival medians, rather than the curves, are compared, those methods are not applicable. Some approaches have been developed to fill this gap. Unfortunately, in general those tests have inflated type I error rates, which make them inapplicable to survival data with small sample sizes. In this paper, Mood’s median test for uncensored data is extended for survival data. The results from a comprehensive simulation study show that the proposed test outperforms existing methods in terms of controlling type I error rate and detecting power.