kidney Kidney catheter data

Description

Data on the recurrence times to infection, at the point of insertion of the catheter, for kidney patients using portable dialysis equipment. Catheters may be removed for reasons other than infection, in which case the observation is censored. Each patient has exactly 2 observations.

This data has often been used to illustrate the use of random effects (frailty) in a survival model. However, one of the males (id 21) is a large outlier, with much longer survival than his peers. If this observation is removed no evidence remains for a random subject effect.

Usage

kidney
data(cancer, package="survival")

Format

patient:	id
time:	time
status:	event status
age:	in years
sex:	1=male, 2=female
disease:	disease type (0=GN, 1=AN, 2=PKD, 3=Other)
frail:	frailty estimate from original paper

Note

The original paper ignored the issue of tied times and so is not exactly reproduced by the survival package.

Source

CA McGilchrist, CW Aisbett (1991), Regression with frailty in survival analysis. Biometrics 47, 461–66.

Examples

kfit <- coxph(Surv(time, status)~ age + sex + disease + frailty(id), kidney)
kfit0 <- coxph(Surv(time, status)~ age + sex + disease, kidney)
kfitm1 <- coxph(Surv(time,status) ~ age + sex + disease + 
		frailty(id, dist='gauss'), kidney)