Estimation of incidence and survival parameters for rare cancer

Cancer prevalence is the proportion of people in a population diagnosed with cancer in the past and still alive. One way to estimate prevalence is via population-based registries, where data on diagnosis and life status of all incident cases occurring in the covered population are collected. In this paper some methods regarding the fitting of incidence and survival models are briefly described and are applied to data on some rare cancer sites, collected by the SEER9 registries in the United States. Due to the relative rarity of these cancers, we were faced with some problems concerning data scarcity. Therefore a special attention has been posed on the graphical diagnostic.