  Methods for the evaluation of the predictive accuracy of biomarkers with
respect to survival outcomes subject to right censoring have been discussed
extensively in the literature. In cancer and other diseases, survival outcomes
are commonly subject to interval censoring by design or due to the follow up
schema. In this paper, we present an estimator for the area under the
time-dependent receiver operating characteristic ROC curve for interval
censored data based on a nonparametric sieve maximum likelihood approach. We
establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator, and illustrate
its finite-sample properties using a simulation study. The application of our
method is illustrated using data from a cancer clinical study. An open-source R
package to implement the proposed method is available on CRAN.
