A class of two-sample nonparametric tests for panel count data

Panel count data frequently occur in many situations including medical follow-up studies and reliability experiments. For two-sample comparison based on panel count data, several procedures have been proposed including Thall and Lachin (1988) and Sun and Fang (2003). In this article, a new class of nonparametric test procedures are presented. The test is a generalization of that for the same problem for failure time data and overcomes some shortcomings of the existing methods. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the presented approach and suggest that it works well. An illustrative example is discussed.