The authors are affiliated with the Institute of Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics, University Medical Center Freiburg and the Freiburg Center for Data Analysis and Modelling, University of Freiburg, Germany. Jan Beyersmann is Senior Statistician and serves on the editorial board of Statistics in Medicine. Arthur Allignol is Statistician and has contributed several R packages on competing risks and multistate models. Martin Schumacher is Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the Institute of Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics, Freiburg. He has been involved in theoretical developments as well as in practical applications of survival analyses and their extensions over many years.

This book enables the reader to analyse complex time-to-event data himself, using the free open source language R for statistical computing

The data situations considered are competing risks--several, mutually exclusive event types and multistate models, that track an individuals history through different stages over time. These methods are a generalization of the now classical survivalanalysis--the analysis of time to one single event. Such data occur in a variety of fields, including life sciences, social sciences, economics and engineering

The methods are explained on a non-technical level and instantly carried out in R. This book covers data structures, simulating data, analyses of real life data and plotting

Includes supplementary material: [...]

Data examples.- An informal introduction to hazard-based analyses.- Competing risks.- Multistate modelling of competing risks.- Nonparametric estimation.- Proportional hazards models.- Nonparametric hypothesis testing.- Further topics in competing risks.- Multistate models and their connection to competing risks.- Nonparametric estimation.- Proportional transition hazards models.- Time-dependent covariates and multistate models.- Further topics in multistate modeling.