Motivated by a longitudinal oral health study, we propose a flexible modeling approach for clustered time-to-event data, when the response of interest can only be determined to lie in an interval obtained from a sequence of examination times (interval-censored data) and on top of that, the determination of the occurrence of the event is subject to misclassification. The clustered time-to-event data are modeled using an accelerated failure time model with random effects and by assuming a penalized Gaussian mixture model for the random effects terms to avoid restrictive distributional assumptions concerning the event times. A general misclassification model is discussed in detail, considering the possibility that different examiners were involved in the assessment of the occurrence of the events for a given subject across time. A Bayesian implementation of the proposed model is described in a detailed manner. We additionally provide empirical evidence showing that the model can be used to estimate the underlying time-to-event distribution and the misclassification parameters without any external information about the latter parameters. We also provide results of a simulation study to evaluate the effect of neglecting the presence of misclassification in the analysis of clustered time-to-event data.

Department of Probability and Mathematical Statistics Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Charles University Prague Sokolovska 83 CZ 186 75 Praha 8 ' Karlín Czech Republic

Department of Statistics Faculty of Mathematics Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Casilla 306 Correo 22 Santiago Chile

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