Product Description
This text on survival analysis provides a straightforward and easy-to-follow introduction to the main concepts and techniques of the subject. It is based on numerous courses given by the author to students and researchers in the health sciences and is written with such readers in mind. Throughout, there is an emphasis on presenting each new topic motivated with real examples of a survival analysis investigation, and then presenting thorough analyses of real data set… More >>
Survival Analysis: A Self-Learning Text
Tags: Analysis, health sciences, self learning, SelfLearning, Survival, survival analysis, Text
#1 by Michael A. Wittie on March 19, 2010 - 3:30 am
This book struck almost every single one of my biggest peeves about texts. Numbers written out as words: this is, essentially, a mathematics book. We don’t like letters, we like numbers, and writing out “thirteen point five” is only outdone by the obnoxiousness of writing out whole equations in the text. Readers who need to be told that “X-3/ln(X+5)” means “x plus three divided by the natural log of x plus five” should probably not be using this text.
Second, the details of examples are sparsely filled, and examples don’t go all the way through. Many of them are great for theoretical concepts, like how a statistic works, but give no hint as to how one might actually employ it. Page after page of SAS, STATA, and SPIDA output are useless without the accompanying code to create them.
The index is astoundingly cursory. It’s really hard to find anything.
Frankly a worthless text, I’m glad I bought it used.
Rating: 2 / 5
#2 by C. Tu on March 19, 2010 - 5:44 am
I am statistics major and I use this book to self-taught. This book clears the basic concepts. It is very easy to read and follow. If you are like me, I guess this the book that you need.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Anonymous on March 19, 2010 - 7:12 am
Unlike other reviewers, I did not find this book very helpful, especially considering the price I paid. The book is essentially a PowerPoint course presentation published with the notes pages as text. Unfortunately, the book is laid out so that the reader must make the connection between the text and the slide itself (they’re stacked side-by-side with no separation). Often, the text discusses the material as though the instructor had a pointer in hand to make the connection — without those visual clues the argument is hard to follow. On the other hand, if you know nothing about survival analysis and only want to run computer programs (specifically SPIDA) and read the output, I guess this book isn’t bad. I’ll keep looking for a good textbook.
Rating: 2 / 5
#4 by Zhang Yi on March 19, 2010 - 8:24 am
I’ve just finished reading chapter 2. There are a bit of errors and it’s written not so well in rigorous point of view. such as:
1. the subscript j of E in the formula of # of failure times on page 59
2. maybe it doesn’t make sure for the notation Var(O_i-E_i)
3. the formula of e_{ij} on page 82.
Rating: 2 / 5
#5 by Hirohiko on March 19, 2010 - 9:53 am
An outstanding book from the same authors that wrote the Logistic Regression self-learning text. Provides excellent descriptions of the methods with examples and details the theory in an understandable way. You really could learn basic survival analysis (Kaplan-Meier, Log-Rank, Cox Regression, etc) with this book alone. It also included instructions for using SAS and Stata which is very helpful. I prefer this text over Hosmer and Lemeshow for ‘usability’.
Rating: 4 / 5