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This work introduces the vast and growing literature on the statistical analysis of factors affecting lifetime with a focus on a nonnegative right-censored response variable exhibiting appreciable variation. More specifically this book is written for demographers epidemiologists and others who are interested in descriptive or explanatory analyses of duration of occupancy of a state such as being in school. In describing the time pattern of exit from a state one gives attention to different ways of exit--a person enrolled in school may die drop out or graduate. In exploratory analyses one may be interested in identifying factors affecting the of occupancy of a state such as the waiting time to conceive after the discontinuation of contraception. Chapters 1 2 and 3 are concerned with the traditional life table focusing on death (exit from life). Departing from the usual treatment attention is given in Chapter 3 to viewing the life table as a Markov process. Thus departure has been prompted by a desire to prepare the reader for Chapter 9 in which multistate life tables are discussed from that perspective. Chapter 4 is concerned with life tables based on survey and observational data while Chapter 5 is devoted to comparisons of life tables. Chapters 6 7 and 8 are devoted to multiple-decrement life tables dealing as they do with 2 or more ways of exit from a given state. Chapter 9 is concerned with multistate life tables traditionally known by the term increment-decrement life tables. Chapters 10 11 12 and 13 deal with explanatory analysis of lifetimes. In Chapter 10 lifetime is viewed as a random variable and Chapter 11 12 and 13 cover various approaches to examining factors affecting the length of life.
Smith et al. (Sun,) studied this question.