# An introduction to survival analysis

on Thu, Feb 07, 2019

It’s one of mankind’s oldest questions - how long will it run? How long will I live? Predicting the length of life has occupied thinkers, scientists, and everybody else throughout history.

What factors influence survival? Why do some people with similar characteristics have different lifespans? Bills of Mortality, published in London beginning in the 1590’s up through the 1800’s, were one of the first comprehensive records of causes of death. These were regular compendiums collected from London’s parishes. As you can see, back in 1801 there were a wide variety of recorded causes, ranging from the expected (“Aged”) to ones that have largely been eliminated (“Small pox”, “Consumption”), to the downright scary (“Evil”).

## Beginnings

More formal attempts at survival analysis date back to life tables constructed in the 17th century by Graunt and Halley. Halley (of comet fame) used them to compute annuity values (among other things), this data coming from Breslau, Germany and published in 1693:

library(tibble)
print(halley2[, 1:8])

##   Age Persons Age.1 Persons.1 Age.2 Persons.2 Age.3 Persons.3
## 1   1    1000     8       680    15       628    22       586
## 2   2     855     9       670    16       622    23       579
## 3   3     798    10       661    17       616    24       573
## 4   4     760    11       653    18       610    25       567
## 5   5     732    12       646    19       604    26       560
## 6   6     710    13       640    20       598    27       553
## 7   7     692    14       634    21       592    28       546


Basically, one keeps track of the number of individuals alive at each year (or other interval) of age. From this, we can compute a simple statistic, a Life Table Estimator, that gives the probability, at birth, of surviving $T$ years or more:

where $n_t$ are the number alive at age $t$ and $d_t$ are the number that die by age $t + 1$.

This is a cross-sectional estimate of survival, and assumes that the survival rate doesn’t change over the time frame covered by the data. This may or may not be a good assumption - certainly unlikely to be true for many societies today, as living conditions continue to improve in many parts of the world. Plotting a smoothed version of survival $S$ (Figure 2) shows a sharp drop in survival for infants, and then an almost constant decline all the way out to age 80 or so (granted, this was in the 1650’s).

x9 <- halley
x9$AtRisk <- x9$Persons
x9$Deceased <- -c(0, diff(x9$AtRisk, 1))
x9$Rate <- 1 - x9$Deceased/x9$AtRisk x9$SurvRate <- cumprod(x9$Rate) x9 %>% ggplot() + geom_line(aes(x = Age, y = SurvRate)) + ggtitle("Figure 2. Smoothed Survival Curve")  From the same data we can also plot (Figure 3) the mortality or hazard rate, that is, the instantaneous rate of change in survival, which shows the classic bathtub-curve shape – a sharp drop in mortality after birth, then a near constant period corresponding to the prime of life, with mortality again increasing as old age approaches. x9 %>% dplyr::filter(Age > 1, Age < 84) %>% ggplot() + geom_line(aes(x = Age, y = 1 - Rate), color = "red") -> plot2 plot2 + ylab("Smoothed Mortality Rate") + ggtitle("Figure 3. Smoothed Hazard Rate Curve")  ## Modern survival analysis The field of survival analysis has come a long ways since these and other pioneering efforts. With the explosion of mathematical and statistical theory in the 20th century and the ongoing advances in computing, we are now able to analyze large quantities of survival and reliability data and assess what underlying causes of death or failure. Insurance, manufacturing, medicine, all rely on statistical models of frailty and survival to inform business decisions, maintenance schedules, and patient treatment. Survival analysis is a vital and burgeoning area of research, and new methodologies are continually emerging. Using methods analogous to those found in linear regression, we can assess differences in survival based on different explanatory or environmental factors. As an example, consider data collected on long cancer deaths by age and gender: library(survival) head(lung)  ## inst time status age sex ph.ecog ph.karno pat.karno meal.cal wt.loss ## 1 3 306 2 74 1 1 90 100 1175 NA ## 2 3 455 2 68 1 0 90 90 1225 15 ## 3 3 1010 1 56 1 0 90 90 NA 15 ## 4 5 210 2 57 1 1 90 60 1150 11 ## 5 1 883 2 60 1 0 100 90 NA 0 ## 6 12 1022 1 74 1 1 50 80 513 0  A modern version of a life table estimator, known as the Kaplan-Meier Estimator, displays the overall survival curve in Figure 4: lung$SurvObj <- with(lung, Surv(time, status == 2))
lung.S1 <- survfit(SurvObj ~ 1, data = lung, conf.type = "log-log")
ggsurvplot(lung.S1, conf.int = T) + ggtitle("Figure 4. Overall survival (days)")


A natural question is to ask what effect, if any, gender has on the survival of lung cancer patients. This can be easily determined graphically (in Figure 5) as well as statistically, showing separate survival curves for men (red) and women (green).

lung.S2 <- survfit(SurvObj ~ sex, data = lung,
conf.type = "log-log")
lung.S2

## Call: survfit(formula = SurvObj ~ sex, data = lung, conf.type = "log-log")
##
##         n events median 0.95LCL 0.95UCL
## sex=1 138    112    270     210     306
## sex=2  90     53    426     345     524

ggsurvplot(lung.S2, conf.int = T) + ggtitle("Figure 5.  Survival curves by gender (days)")


In this case, women have a median survival time of 426 days vs. 270 for men, and this difference is significant at a 95% level of confidence - the upper and lower confidence limits for median survival of the two groups do not overlap.

In closing, this blog post has only scratched the surface of survival analysis techniques. A list of more sophisticated models for survival include:

• parametric models (used especially in manufacturing and engineering reliability studies)
• semi-parametric models (such as the Cox Proportional Hazards Model, which allows for analysis of censored data)
• competing risk models
• Bayesian models,
• models with time-varying covariates and parameters

A good place to start for further research is to look at the R package survival by Therneau. A good general reference for survival analysis methodology is “Survival Analysis: Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data” by Klein and Moeschberger.