  Statistical estimation and inference for marginal hazard models with varying
coefficients for multivariate failure time data are important subjects in
survival analysis. A local pseudo-partial likelihood procedure is proposed for
estimating the unknown coefficient functions. A weighted average estimator is
also proposed in an attempt to improve the efficiency of the estimator. The
consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators are established
and standard error formulas for the estimated coefficients are derived and
empirically tested. To reduce the computational burden of the maximum local
pseudo-partial likelihood estimator, a simple and useful one-step estimator is
proposed. Statistical properties of the one-step estimator are established and
simulation studies are conducted to compare the performance of the one-step
estimator to that of the maximum local pseudo-partial likelihood estimator. The
results show that the one-step estimator can save computational cost without
compromising performance both asymptotically and empirically and that an
optimal weighted average estimator is more efficient than the maximum local
pseudo-partial likelihood estimator. A data set from the Busselton Population
Health Surveys is analyzed to illustrate our proposed methodology.
