ABSTRACT
The basic model descriptions of survival data are introduced. Basically, the distribution of survival data may be either continuous or discrete, but the nonparametric estimators of the distributions of survival timeare discrete in any case. Therefore, the discrete models are necessary to know in order to understandnonparametric estimation. In this chapter, only nonparametric estimation is discussed. This means that noassumptions whatsoever are made about the true underlying distribution. The Kaplan-Meier and Nelson-Aalen estimators are introduced.
