Survival Analysis

Abstract

Survival analysis is a collection of statistical techniques for the analysis of data on “time-to-event” as a response variable and its relationships to other explanatory variables. The notion of “event” depends on the context and the applications. The event in question may be dealt as may happen in a biomedical context or churning in a business context or machine failure in an engineering context. Survival methods are characterized by “censoring” by which the event in question may not have happened (at the time observations end) for certain observational units (cases) in the data; yet, such censored data are useful and are judiciously used in survival analysis. In that sense, survival analysis methods differ from techniques such as regression analysis.