17.6 Survival Analysis (Pro Only)

Survival-Analysis

Survival Analysis is used in the bio-sciences and in quality assurance to quantify survivorship in a population under study. Survival data record the lapsed time to some specific event -- it could be the death of a subject or the failure of a manufactured part. One frequently-encountered problem with these studies is that the time to the event of interest is not always observable for all subjects; the subject drops out of the study or the manufactured part is destroyed in an accident, for instance. In such cases, we refer to these missing data as "censored" data. Survival Analysis is, therefore, concerned with measuring the portion of the population that "survive" past some given time, and with quantifying such things as the rate at which death or failure occurs, or which factors influence the likelihood of survival or continued functionality.

OriginPro supports three widely used survival analysis tests: the Kaplan-Meier Product-Limit Estimator, the Cox Proportional Hazards Model, and the Weibull Fit Model. The techniques compute a survivorship function (the probability of survival to a given time based on a sample of failure times) and a summary of event (failure) and censored values. With each of these tests, you can elect to create and customize survival plots by specifying options under the Survival Plot branch.