It was Casey Stengel who offered the sage advice, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
When you need to fit a regression model to survival data, you have to take a fork in the road. One road asks you to make a distributional assumption about your data and the other does not. (more…)
Survival data models provide interpretation of data representing the time until an event occurs. In many situations, the event is death, but it can also represent the time to other bad events such as 
cancer relapse or failure of a medical device. It can also be used to denote time to positive events such as pregnancy. Often patients are lost to follow-up prior to death, but you can still use the information about them while they were in your study to better estimate the survival probability over time.
This is done using the Kaplan-Meier curve, an approach developed by (more…)