Unfamiliar jargon like Kaplan-Meier curves, PROC PHREG, right-censored and hazard functions can be daunting to the newcomer. Survival analysis is really quite straightforward; it is simply a set of statistical techniques used when the focus is “time to event”. The event can be death, divorce, arrest, substance abuse or literally anything else. You’ve been wanting…
Next question on categorical data analysis … Correlated proportions. There are a lot of reasons why you might have correlated data in a two-way contingency table. The most common is that you have measured people twice. I have heard people say that including discussion of homosexuality in school makes it more likely that children…
The other day I wrote about how I had never had the need to do a binomial test for a proportion with SAS. In my business, at least, the question of whether the proportion in the population equals X just doesn’t come up very often. Actually, given that I had taught not one, but two…
Anyone who claims to know all of SAS is clinically insane – Ernest Hemingway (not intended to be a factual attribution) Okay, I admit it, Hemingway didn’t really say that, but he would have, except for being dead and all. As usual, this year I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted at the…
At the opening session, Randy Guard from SAS talked about making a difference. That sounded promising, but then the examples he gave were how analyses could be run on large databases of stock market data so much more quickly that instead of having market value overnight traders could get the data hourly. It sounded like…
The rocket scientist decided the most important use of his spare time was to pose Homer as an R6σ specialist. I was looking at this in my email and wondered why I ever decided to actually have a child with this person. Then, I looked at the books in the background. That’s why. If you…
I’m teaching a class on categorical data analysis after the Western Users of SAS Software conference next week. As always, I have WAY more information than I can cover. Handouts are limited to 40 pages so I sent the organizers 80 slides but I know I am going to cover way more than that. Why…
This is one of those things that is obvious after someone points it out to you and you smack your head saying, “Of course! I knew that.” As I was going through everything I have to say about analyzing categorical data trying to winnow it down to a three-hour workshop for the WUSS conference (Western…
I am probably going to hell for this … because today I was studying the death rate of older people using the data from Kaiser Permanente available on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website and really having a great time. Reading .stc First funny thing, after I extracted it and noticed…
This month was my 14th wedding anniversary. For some reason, a number of my close friends and relatives chose this occasion to tell me that they had bet this marriage would not last more than five years. Which got me to thinking about survival analysis …. (whether or not it should have gotten me to…