Fit a censored log-normal distribution to data using MLE

Question

I have some data for numbers that are positive and these numbers are capped above at C (so if a sample from my data should have exceeded C, the data generating process will simply return C).

I know which of the samples were capped and which ones were not.

I am happy to assume that these data points are lognormally distributed and would like to estimate the parameters of the uncapped lognormal distribution. How do I use my uncapped data and apply MLE to achieve this? If lognormal is too hard for some reason, I am open to using normal or other distributions.

You can just write a loglikelihood function and optimize it numerically. — kjetil b halvorsen, Oct 14 '15 at 02:48
There's an algorithm outlined here that's suitable for the normal case and my previous comment gets you the lognormal from that. — Glen_b, Oct 14 '15 at 06:46
@Glen_b That algorithm is for right truncated data which is not the same as right censored data. — Jarle Tufto, Jul 29 '17 at 22:12
@Jarle you're correct, I was responding to the title (which previously said "truncated), but the description is indeed of a censored problem. I should have typed censored in my first comment and the one at the link doesn't apply either, as you say. Thanks for pointing this out. — Glen_b, Jul 30 '17 at 01:02

Jarle Tufto · Answer 1 · 2017-07-29T22:00:47.583

Since you know that the event $y>C$ occurred for some observations you have right censored data. If such events instead went unrecorded, the data would have been right truncated. Fitting a lognormal, intercept only, survival regression model as follows gives you MLEs of the location and scale parameter of the lognormal:

> library(survival)
> y <- rlnorm(1000, 0, 1) # Simulated data with location 0 and scale 1
> delta <- y<2 # right censoring at C = 2
> y[!delta] <- 2
> survreg(Surv(y, delta) ~ 1, dist="lognormal")
Call:
survreg(formula = Surv(y, delta) ~ 1, dist = "lognormal")

Coefficients:
 (Intercept) 
-0.008081718 

Scale= 0.9564241 

Loglik(model)= -978.1   Loglik(intercept only)= -978.1
n= 1000

Fit a censored log-normal distribution to data using MLE

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