ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SURVIVAL-TIME AND ORDINAL COVARIATES

An application of the method of rank correlation is proposed for testi ng independence between a censored survival time and an ordinal covari ate. The test statistic counts the number of concordances minus the nu mber of discordances at each time with event(s) and adds across times; it is expressible as a score statistic within the proportional hazard s framework. The proposed test includes, as a special case, a generali zation of Jonckheere's test against ordered alternatives and as applie d to the analysis of categorical data, it can be seen as a generalizat ion of the Mantel-Haenszel procedure.