Survival Analysis

In logistic regression, we are interested in how risk factors are associated with the presence or absence of an event. Sometimes, however, we are interested in how a risk factor or treatment affects the time to the event. The problem of analyzing time to event data arises in a number of applied fields, such as medicine, public health, and epidemiology. Survival analysis is a collection of statistical methods that are used to describe, explain, or predict the occurrence and timing of events. This chapter focuses on basic concepts of survival analysis, survival rate estimation, comparison of survival curves, and SPSS software procedures.