ABSTRACT
Survival analysis involves the study of lifetime distributions. By this analysts mean lifetimes of people, of cancer patients, of industrial robots, of components, of cogs, of software. Lifetime data commonly occur in the engineering environment. This chapter considers a broad range of applications both industrial and biological. Lifetime data commonly occur in the engineering environment. In this example from a Canadian aluminium smelter, alumina is liquefied in a steel-lined box which is built to withstand extremely high temperatures. In the smelting process, aluminium is produced as a byproduct when the cell functions like a battery with molten alumina as the electrolyte. The data therefore represent death times as well as lifetimes. For this particular data there are observations on both mice kept under standard laboratory conditions and mice kept in a germ-free environment during the course of the trial — these experimental conditions are outcomes of an explanatory variable.
