ABSTRACT
It might be thought a little strange that this chapter on discrete failure times, surely a rather specialised topic, should precede the one on continuous failure times. The reason is that the non-parametric methods for the continuous case rely on the machinations and manipulations for the discrete case, covered here in Section 5.5. It is exactly the same situation as that which called for the material of Section 4.1 to come first in that chapter.
