Event History Analysis With R

This book can be used as a companion to a more pedagogical text on survival analysis. For someone looking for the appropriate R command to use, for fitting certain kind of survival model, this book is apt. This book neither gives the intuition nor the math behind the various models. It appears like an elaborate help manual for all the packages in R, related to event history analysis.

I guess one of the reasons for the author writing this book is to highlight his package eha on CRAN. The author’s package is basically a layer on survival package that has some advanced techniques which I guess a serious researcher in this field can appreciate. The book takes the reader through the entire gamut of models using a pretty dry format, i.e. it gives the basic form of a model, the R commands to fit the model,and some cursory commentary on how to interpret the output. The difficulty level is not a linear function from start to end. I found some very intricate level stuff interspersed among some very elementary estimators. An abrupt discussion of Poisson regression breaks the flow in understanding Cox model and its extensions. The chapter on cox regression contains detailed and unnecessary discussion about some elementary aspects of any regression framework. Keeping these cribs aside, the book is useful as a quick reference to functions from survival, coxme, cmprsk and eha packages.