Kalbfleisch & Prentice (2002) presented data from Crowley & Hu (1977) on survival times of patients in the Stanford heart transplant program. The following figure shows a portion of the data, time is the number of days counting from the day a patient was accepted into the program until observation of that patient was discontinued. The status variable tells whether a patient was alive when observation was discontinued. We know that the first patient on the list survived for 6 days. However, we know only that the second patient on the list survived for at least 11 days. We can't tell how much longer that patient lived beyond the 11-th day.
The file StanfordHeart-a.sav |
You can fit a model to censored data like this if you recode it as follows.
The file StanfordHeart-b.sav |
You will have to make time a string variable in order to allow for the ">" characters.