Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series

New Developments in Relative Survival

Janez Stare

Head, Institute of Biomedical Informatics
Ljubljana University, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Friday, April 22, time and place to be determined

Intended Audience: Persons interested in applied statistics, statistical theory, epidemiology

Relative survival techniques are used to compare survival experience in a study cohort with the one expected should the cohort follow the background population rates. The techniques are especially useful when the cause-specific death information is not accurate or not available as they provide a measure of excess mortality in a group of patients with a certain disease.

While these methods are based on group comparisons, I will present a transformation approach which instead gives for each individual an outcome measure relative to the appropriate background population. The new outcome measure is easily interpreted and can be analysed using standard survival analysis techniques. It provides additional information on relative survival, and gives new options in regression analysis. One distinctive feature of this approach is that it adjusts for expected survival before modeling.

The second part of the talk will be devoted to diagnostics for the additive model, the most commonly used model for analyzing relative survival data. Diagnostics is based on Schoenfeld-like residuals which we have recently introduced.

I will use examples from studies of myocardial infarction and colon cancer to illustrate the methods.

Related reference: J Stare, R Henderson, M Pohar (2005): An individual measure of relative survival. JRSS C 54:115-126.

Presenter Information