vi Preface
included in the study only if the event has occurred by a given date. The
use of counting process methodology has, in recent years, allowed for
substantial advances in the statistical theory to account for censoring
and truncation in survival experiments. The book by Andersen et al.
(1993) provides an excellent survey of the mathematics of this theory.
In this book we shall attempt to make these complex methods more
accessible to applied researchers without an advanced mathematical
background by presenting the essence of the statistical methods and
illustrating these results in an applied framework. Our emphasis is on
applying these techniques, as well as classical techniques not based
on the counting process theory, to data rather than on the theoreti-
cal development of these tools. Practical suggestions for implementing
the various methods are set off in a series of practical notes at the
end of each section. Technical details of the derivation of these tech-
niques (which are helpful to the understanding of concepts, though not
essential to using the methods of this book) are sketched in a series of
theoretical notes at the end of each section or are separated into their
own sections. Some more advanced topics, for which some additional
mathematical sophistication is needed for their understanding or for
which standard software is not available, are given in separate chapters
or sections. These notes and advanced topics can be skipped without
a loss of continuity.
We envision two complementary uses for this book. The first is as
a reference book for investigators who find the need to analyze cen-
sored or truncated life time data. The second use is as a textbook for
a graduate level course in survival analysis. The minimum prerequisite
for such course is a traditional course in statistical methodology. The
material included in this book comes from our experience in teaching
such a course for master’s level biostatistics students at The Ohio State
University and at the Medical College of Wisconsin, as well as from our
experience in consulting with investigators from The Ohio State Univer-
sity, The University of Missouri, The Medical College of Wisconsin, The
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, The National Center for Toxicological
Research, and The International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters that can be grouped into
five major themes. The first theme introduces the reader to basic con-
cepts and terminology. It consists of the first three chapters which deal
with examples of typical data sets one may encounter in biomedical
applications of this methodology, a discussion of the basic parameters
to which inference is to be made, and a detailed discussion of censoring
and truncation. New to the second edition is Section 2.7 that presents a
discussion of summary statistics for competing risks probabilities. Sec-
tion 3.6 gives a brief introduction to counting processes, and is included
for those individuals with a minimal background in this area who wish
to have a conceptual understanding of this methodology. This section
can be omitted without jeopardizing the reader’s understanding of later
sections of the book.
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