Inference on overlap index: with an application to cancer data

The quantification of overlap between two distributions has applications in various fields of biology, medical, genetic, and ecological research. In this article, new overlap and containment indices are considered for quantifying the niche overlap between two species/populations. Some new properties of these indices are established and the problem of estimation is studied, when the two distributions are exponential with different scale parameters. We propose several estimators and compare their relative performance with respect to different loss functions. The asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimators of these indices is proved under certain conditions. We also obtain confidence intervals of the indices based on three different approaches and compare their average lengths and coverage probabilities. The point and confidence interval procedures developed here are applied on a breast cancer data set to analyze the similarity between the survival times of patients undergoing two different types of surgery. Additionally, the similarity between the relapse free times of these two sets of patients is also studied.