| Abstract: | A common testing problem for a life table or survival data is to test the equality of two survival distributions when the data is both grouped and censored. Several tests have been proposed in the literature which require various assumptions about the censoring distributions. It is shown that if these conditions are relaxed then the tests may no longer have the stated properties. The maximum likelihood test of equality when no assumptions are made about the censoring marginal distributions is derived. The properties of the test are found and it is compared to the existing tests. The fact that no assumptions are required about the censoring distributions make the test a useful initial testing procedure. |
