An Introduction to Survival Analysis Using Stata, Third Edition [Paperback]

For any researcher interested in the application of certain statistical models, the best books are the ones that explain both the theoretical concepts behind the model, and how they are applied using a certain statistical package. This book does an amazing job on both scales. What is really admirable is that all this is done in 390 pages. You do not need to know anything about survival analysis to use this book, but you do need to know some stata commands. For example, if you dont know what _n, _N, generate, recode, or twoway do, then you will find it hard to follow the examples. If however you know these very simple commands, then you will really gain a lot from this book. The authors explain the concepts behind survival analysis so clearly that even a person not intending to use stata will benefit from this book. The book explains most concepts in an intuitive way and so no derivation of formulas is presented, only the final formula. The book also touches on advanced topics like competing risks and shared frailty models. I really liked the chapter on the cox model diagnostics, but the most important chapters were those that described the stset command. This is the most important command and the only one that you must use before any analysis. It is also very powerful, and the authors carefully explain how the command should be used. One chapter which I didnt like much was chapter 10 (Model building). It was only 20 pages and therefore not complete. For example, nothing was said about the best-subsets method of covariate selection. It is important to realize that this book will not be enough by itself. Its not possible to know everything you need to know about both stata and survival analysis in less than 400 pages. However, this book is a perfect starting place. An excellent text that would go along very nicely with this is "Applied Survival Analysis" by Hosmer, Lemeshow and May. It has some technical stuff but only the basics and it is really strong in the area which this book is week at: model building. Together, these two books will help you use survival analysis models very easily.

I needed a survival analysis introduction and potentially will be using Stata to do survival work. This book seemed like just the ticket and with the positive review by one reviewer I decided to make the purchase. Unfortunately, I have found the book to be largely inaccessible. It is written for advanced users both of survival analysis and Stata. In all fairness, there was no 'gentle introduction' in the title so it was my problem for taking the risk of buying the book. So, if you need an introduction to survival analysis look elsewhere. Follow the recommendation of the above reviewer or check out the Singer and Willett book entitled 'Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis'.