Event History Analysis with R

Appendix B

Survival Distributions

B.1 Introduction

The survival distributions we discuss here are all available as functions in R. The most basic survival distribution is the Exponential distribution, not because it is useful as is in demographic applications (it isn’t), but because it is a reference distribution, a special case of other distributions, and a building block in many useful models.

The piecewise constant hazards, Gamma, and the Weibull distributions are all generalizations of the exponential.

B.2 Relevant Distributions in R

In R, there are several families of distributions available. The ones that are relevant in survival analysis are characterized by having positive support. For each family of distributions, four functions are ...