Variable Selection in General Frailty Models Using Penalized H-Likelihood

However, in semiparametric frailty models, these methods have been relatively less studied because the marginal likelihood function involves analytically intractable integrals, particularly when modeling multicomponent or correlated frailties. In this article, we propose a simple but unified procedure via a penalized h-likelihood (HL) for variable selection of fixed effects in a general class of semiparametric frailty models, in which random effects may be shared, nested, or correlated.

We consider three penalty functions (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator [LASSO], smoothly clipped absolute deviation [SCAD], and HL) in our variable selection procedure. We show that the proposed method can be easily implemented via a slight modification to existing HL estimation approaches. Simulation studies also show that the procedure using the SCAD or HL penalty performs well.