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Proportional hazards Proportional hazards in survival analysis means that the rate at which an event of interest occurs over time for two or more groups or individuals is proportional over time. Specifically, it assumes that the hazard ratio, which represents the relative rate of an event occurring between two groups or individuals, is constant over […]

Censoring refers to a situation in survival analysis where the event of interest is not observed for some of the individuals under study. In this Statistical Primer, we’ll define three types of censoring often seen in survival analysis studies. Censoring occurs when the information on the survival time is incomplete or only partially observed. Censoring […]

The Cox model The Cox model, also known as the proportional hazards model, is a popular statistical tool used to analyse survival data. It was developed by British statistician Sir David Cox, and published in 1972. It has gained popularity largely by avoiding making parametric assumptions about the shape of the baseline rate in a […]

Survival analysis is a statistical method used to analyse the time until an event of interest occurs. The key feature of survival analysis is that the outcome has two dimensions: – an event indicator (yes/no), and – the time spent at risk for the event All survival analyses require precise definitions of start and end of […]

Joint longitudinal-survival models have been widely developed, but there are many avenues of research where they are lacking in terms of methodological development, and importantly, accessible implementations. We think merlin fills a few gaps. In this post, we’ll take a look at the extension to modelling multiple continuous longitudinal outcomes, jointly with survival. For simplicity, I’ll concentrate […]

In this example I’ll look at the analysis of clustered survival data with three levels. This kind of data arises in the meta-analysis of recurrent event times, where we have observations (events or censored), k (level 1), nested within patients, j (level 2), nested within trials, i (level 3). Random intercepts The first example will […]

Today we’re going to take a little look into probabilistic sensitivity analysis (PSA), and how it can be implemented within the context of survival analysis. Now PSA is used extensively in health economic modelling, where a particular parameter (or parameters) of interest, are altered or varied, to represent different scenarios and levels of variation. We […]

In this post we’ll focus on how to model time-dependent effects (non-proportional hazards), specifically within a joint longitudinal-survival model. Now joint models are becoming commonplace in medical research, but as always, the fundamentals still matter, and indeed are often ignored. We’re going to look at how to account for time-dependency in both baseline covariates in […]

Interval censoring occurs when we don’t know the exact time an event occurred, only that it occurred within a particular time interval. Such data is common in ophthalmology and dentistry, where events are only picked up at scheduled appointments, but they actually occurred at some point since the previous visit. Arguably, we could say all survival data […]