This book collects and unifies statistical models and methods that have been proposed for analyzing interval-censored failure time data. It provides the first comprehensive coverage of the topic of interval-censored data and complements the books on right-censored data. The focus of the book is on nonparametric and semiparametric inferences, but it also describes parametric and imputation approaches. This book provides an up-to-date reference for people who are conducting research on the analysis of interval-censored failure time data as well as for those who need to analyze interval-censored data to answer substantive questions.

Missing data pose challenges to real-life data analysis. Simple ad-hoc fixes, like deletion or mean imputation, only work under highly restrictive conditions, which are often not met in practice. Multiple imputation replaces each missing value by multiple plausible values. The variability between these replacements reflects our ignorance of the true (but missing) value. Each of the completed data set is then analyzed by standard methods, and the results are pooled to obtain unbiased estimates with correct confidence intervals. Multiple imputation is a general approach that also inspires novel solutions to old problems by reformulating the task at hand as a missing-data problem. This is the second edition of a popular book on multiple imputation, focused on explaining the application of methods through detailed worked examples using the MICE package as developed by the author. This new edition incorporates the recent developments in this fast-moving field. This class-tested book avoids mathematical and technical details as much as possible: formulas are accompanied by verbal statements that explain the formula in accessible terms. The book sharpens the reader’s intuition on how to think about missing data, and provides all the tools needed to execute a well-grounded quantitative analysis in the presence of missing data.

Readers will find in the pages of this book a treatment of the statistical analysis of clustered survival data. Such data are encountered in many scientific disciplines including human and veterinary medicine, biology, epidemiology, public health and demography. A typical example is the time to death in cancer patients, with patients clustered in hospitals. Frailty models provide a powerful tool to analyze clustered survival data. In this book different methods based on the frailty model are described and it is demonstrated how they can be used to analyze clustered survival data. All programs used for these examples are available on the Springer website.

Survival analysis is a highly active area of research with applications spanning the physical, engineering, biological, and social sciences. In addition to statisticians and biostatisticians, researchers in this area include epidemiologists, reliability engineers, demographers and economists. The economists survival analysis by the name of duration analysis and the analysis of transition data. We attempted to bring together leading researchers, with a common interest in developing methodology in survival analysis, at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop. The research works collected in this volume are based on the presentations at the Workshop. Analysis of survival experiments is complicated by issues of censoring, where only partial observation of an individual's life length is available and left truncation, where individuals enter the study group if their life lengths exceed a given threshold time. Application of the theory of counting processes to survival analysis, as developed by the Scandinavian School, has allowed for substantial advances in the procedures for analyzing such experiments. The increased use of computer intensive solutions to inference problems in survival analysis~ in both the classical and Bayesian settings, is also evident throughout the volume. Several areas of research have received special attention in the volume.

Survival Analysis Using S: Analysis of Time-to-Event Data is designed as a text for a one-semester or one-quarter course in survival analysis for upper-level or graduate students in statistics, biostatistics, and epidemiology. Prerequisites are a standard pre-calculus first course in probability and statistics, and a course in applied linear regression models. No prior knowledge of S or R is assumed. A wide choice of exercises is included, some intended for more advanced students with a first course in mathematical statistics. The authors emphasize parametric log-linear models, while also detailing nonparametric procedures along with model building and data diagnostics. Medical and public health researchers will find the discussion of cut point analysis with bootstrap validation, competing risks and the cumulative incidence estimator, and the analysis of left-truncated and right-censored data invaluable. The bootstrap procedure checks robustness of cut point analysis and determines cut point(s). In a chapter written by Stephen Portnoy, censored regression quantiles - a new nonparametric regression methodology (2003) - is developed to identify important forms of population heterogeneity and to detect departures from traditional Cox models. By generalizing the Kaplan-Meier estimator to regression models for conditional quantiles, this methods provides a valuable complement to traditional Cox proportional hazards approaches.

Making complex methods more accessible to applied researchers without an advanced mathematical background, the authors present the essence of new techniques available, as well as classical techniques, and apply them to data. Practical suggestions for implementing the various methods are set off in a series of practical notes at the end of each section, while technical details of the derivation of the techniques are sketched in the technical notes. This book will thus be useful for investigators who need to analyse censored or truncated life time data, and as a textbook for a graduate course in survival analysis, the only prerequisite being a standard course in statistical methodology.

This book is an accessible, practical and comprehensive guide for researchers from multiple disciplines including biomedical, epidemiology, engineering and the social sciences. Written for accessibility, this book will appeal to students and researchers who want to understand the basics of survival and event history analysis and apply these methods without getting entangled in mathematical and theoretical technicalities. Inside, readers are offered a blueprint for their entire research project from data preparation to model selection and diagnostics. Engaging, easy to read, functional and packed with enlightening examples, ‘hands-on’ exercises, conversations with key scholars and resources for both students and instructors, this text allows researchers to quickly master advanced statistical techniques. It is written from the perspective of the ‘user’, making it suitable as both a self-learning tool and graduate-level textbook. Also included are up-to-date innovations in the field, including advancements in the assessment of model fit, unobserved heterogeneity, recurrent events and multilevel event history models. Practical instructions are also included for using the statistical programs of R, STATA and SPSS, enabling readers to replicate the examples described in the text.