Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss several topics that are common to many different methods of survival analysis:

• censoring, a nearly universal feature of survival data.

• common ways of representing the probability distribution of event times, especially the survivor function and the hazard function.

• choice of origin in the measurement of time, a tricky but important issue that is rarely discussed in the literature on survival analysis.

• basic data structure required for most computer programs that perform survival analysis.