Survival Analysis Using SAS: A Practical Guide, Second Edition

If you read the reviews of the first edition of this book ( Survival Analysis Using SAS: A Practical Guide ) you will see that everyone loved it. This edition is even better. The new edition is updated to cover a *LOT* of new functionality. There are new tests, new methods (especially noteworthy are the new Bayesian techniques), and a lot of new graphics. Things that used to be done with custom macros are now built into SAS and Allison covers them with the same clarity as people loved in the first edition.To get a feel for the updates, the chapter on Kaplan-Meier methods is greatly expanded (don't worry if you don't know what that means he explains both the math and concepts beautifully). In the first edition he showed how to test for differences between three treatment groups but if there were differences in between the groups you could not test to see if group "a" differed from "b" or "b" from "c", etc., and adjust the p-values for multiple comparisons, this edition covers these critical tests (with adjustments for multiple comparison). There is also a lot of new material on graphics, like getting hazard function estimates with confidence intervals.If you are a biomedical researcher, this book explains both the reasons why you will want to do a test and how to conduct it. Basically Allison makes SAS seem like the best choice for survival analysis.

I'm only 80 or so pages in, and I'm already making an impact at work. What more could you want? I just wanted to chime in with my agreement with all of the other positive reviews for this book. It's a great tutorial if you're comfortable with OLS and probit regression with MLE and want to add survival models to your repertoire. I'm really getting a lot out of this book so far and will update my review once I've completed it. No gripes whatsoever up to this point.

This book isn't as clear and helpful as the other reviewers seem to suggest. The background information on survival analysis is clear enough, as is the overview on the pros/cons of each SAS procedure. However, the examples leave much to be desired. The author assumes a fairly advanced understanding of statistics. I conduct social science research, have a reasonable understanding of statistics, and had hoped to teach myself survival analysis. I found that the author has written a text that requires a fair amount more mathematics and statistics background. Throughout the book, the author regularly references mathematical formulas and falls into "stats-speak" which muddles the explanation. I'd hoped that this book was more in line with "Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling with IBM SPSS" by Heck, Thomas, and Tabata, which I found explains advanced statistical topics in a much more straight-forward manner and is chock full of beautifully-explained step-by-step examples.

I am a MS Statistics student, using this book in a supplemental fashion in my Survival Analysis class. This book is not only a great how-to manual for SAS users, but even more-so, I find Allison's conversational tone makes for a perfect supplement for the subject in general. He articulately moves through the concepts, and even if I wasn't using SAS I'd get a lot out of his presentation of Survival Analysis in general.I was originally thinking I'd be thumbing through, looking for code, but on the contrary I'm more engaged in the text than with the primary Klein textbook we're using.His frequent references to OLS regression, and discussion of MLE have really enhanced my understanding.

This is one of the clearest and simplest books on Survival analysis, and a pleasure to read. The subject matter is developed gradually and with with minimum pre-requisites beyond a working knowledge of and familiarity with linear regression.A great primer, though if you are implementing some of the Survival Analysis techniques (as opposed to just using SAS), you will have to supplement this with a more extensive work.

First two chapters are great, looking forward to reading the rest.

practical book with SAS. I like it specially for the discrete time chapter.

a very practical guide for survival analysis. a must read for people working on mortgage PD analysis

Having struggled for a number of weeks trying to make sense of the survival analysis functions in SAS through internet searches, coming across this book has enabled me to quickly make progress on my project. It covers, in a clear and logical manner, the main techniques available in SAS for undertaking survival analysis together with sufficient theoretical background.

A great book for people who wants to learn basic Survival Analysis. The best thing of the book is that the author is very knowledgeable and practical. I found the book very useful in my daily work analyzing health related data. The author did a terrific job at bridging the academic learning with practice. This 2nd edition includes updated SAS codes (eg. Proc PHREG was improved in SAS 9.2) and some minor changes to the text were made since the first edition. It would be beneficial if one already has basic epidemiology knowlege and SAS programming skills. Even though this is not a book written for beginners in my mind, it would not be a good advanced textbook for Survival Analysis. For example, it does not have in-depth discussions on how the formulae were derived. In summary, having used both editions, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in laerning Survival Analysis.

Good book for my survival analysis class and useful for the workplace/research too.

I already bought lots of books via Amazon and was asked to give comments on them, thing I did not do, because I was not so Happy; but this time, this text gives me what i need to conduct survival analysis. I am very happy with the document, and i should give 5 stars to mark it.I recommend it to anybody which want to learn more about the topic of survival analysis.Jonas Meney