Time-to-Event Variables – An Introduction

In this short chapter, we will introduce another branch of statistics called survival analysis, which is related to survival and time-censoring studies. Survival analysis is also called time-to-event variable analysis, which is a particular statistical outcome type that requires other techniques than those used in the few last chapters that we have studied. A time-to-event variable analysis studies, for example, whether a participant has an event of interest during the study timeframe. In other words, we study the proportion of a sample surviving after a specific time point and the rate at which the survived sample proportion will fail or die, or whether there are survival differences in different treatment groups. The term survival in survival analysis is originally based on the time from treatment until death in the medical field. However, survival analysis is readily applicable to many fields including engineering (where it is referred...