Testing the no-treatment effect based on a possibly misspecified accelerated failure time model

The accelerated failure time model is a useful alternative to the Cox proportional hazard model. We investigate whether or not a misspecified accelerated failure time model provides a valid test of the no-treatment effect in randomized clinical trials. We show that the minimum dispersion statistic based on rank regression by Wei et al. (1990) must be modified in order to conduct valid tests under misspecification, whereas the resampling-based methods by Jin et al. (2003) are valid without any modification. Numerical studies are conducted to examine the small sample behavior of the modified minimum dispersion statistic and the resampling-based method. Finally, an illustration is given with a dataset from a clinical trial.