Survival Analysis
Survival analysis is a method for analyzing the time to an event rather than the event itself and is used extensively in medical studies to assess survival rates or disease recurrence rates. The method is also gaining increasing usage and acceptance in many other fields, such as in engineering, to assess the failure rates of mechanical systems or parts, and in many other sectors, such as economics, sociology, and sales forecasts.
If you have a pair of categorical variables, Gender [male; female] and Survival [yes; no], you can simply run Fisher's Exact Test to find out whether men are more likely than women to die (as a result of some disease or other).
Alternatively, if you have a third variable, 'Time To Event,' then you can see how the event in question unfolds over time rather than just a final snapshot at the end of the study, and this is the essence of survival analysis.
A dataset for survival analysis typically looks like Figure 4.18.
