LIMITATIONS
CRC
This study features some limitations. The first limitation is that the current samples are limited to CRC patients in Australia and Canada, which may influence our analysis and result. Future research is needed to validate the findings in other independent cohorts. Furthermore, we used 16 weeks of QoLs to predict overall survival beyond 16 weeks. We also considered using shorter time periods, for example, 8 weeks to predict survival performance. Both results are consistent. However, using 8 weeks follow‐up of QoL data provided reduced information for QoL change pattern estimation and results in higher variation. Finally, we acknowledge that in some studies, the QoL measures of patients might not be missing at random. We will extend our methodology to deal with other missing patterns in the future research.