Survival Analysis Using SAS

CHAPTER 2

Basic Concepts of Survival Analysis

Introduction

Censoring

Describing Survival Distributions

Interpretations of the Hazard Function

Some Simple Hazard Models

The Origin of Time

Data Structure

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I discuss several topics that are common to many different methods of survival analysis:

■ censoring, a nearly universal feature of survival data

■ common ways of representing the probability distribution of event times, especially the survivor function and the hazard function

■ choice of origin in the measurement of time, a tricky but important issue that is rarely discussed in the literature on survival analysis

■ the basic data structure required for most computer programs that perform survival analysis.

CENSORING ...