ABSTRACT
Survival analysis traditionally focuses on the analysis of time duration until one or more events happen and, more generally, positive-valued random variables. Classical examples are the time to death in biological organisms, the time from diagnosis of a disease until death, the time between administration of a vaccine and development of an infection, the time from the start of treatment of a symptomatic disease and the suppression of symptoms, the time to failure in mechanical systems, the length of stay in a hospital, duration of a strike, the total amount paid by a health insurance, the time to getting a high school diploma. This topic may be called reliability theory or reliability analysis in engineering, duration analysis or duration modeling in economics, and event history analysis in sociology. Typically, survival data are not fully and/or directly observed, but rather censored and the most commonly encountered form is right censoring.
