Biostatistics For Dummies

Chapter 24

Survival Regression

In This Chapter

Knowing when to use survival regression

Describing the concepts behind survival regression

Running and interpreting the outcome of survival regression

Peeking at prognosis curves

Estimating sample size for survival regression

Survival regression is one of the most commonly used techniques in biostatistics. It overcomes the limitations of the log-rank test (see Chapter 23) and lets you analyze how survival time is influenced by one or more predictors (the X variables), which can be categorical or numerical (see Chapter 7). In this chapter, I introduce survival regression: when to use it, its basic concepts, running it and interpreting the output, building prognosis curves, and figuring out the sample size you need.

Note: Because time-to-event data is so often applied to survival, where the event is death, I use the terms death and survival time in this chapter, but everything I say applies also to analyzing times to the first occurrence ...