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I work in a lab where group members sometimes individually carry out an experiment of the following form:

  • pairs are bred at some definite time
  • the pairs are grouped by in experimental treatments (i.e. 25 pairs in condition A, 25 pairs in B)
  • the time to a certain event occuring is measured

Usually we would analyse this data in the lazy/standard way - i.e. we would use linear models to look for differences between group means and then ANOVA to test if the difference in group means are significant between treatments.

I have recently realised that as our data is interval-censored (i.e. we don't really record event time-points, but windows of time in which the event occured), and have begun using interval-censored survival models.

What I can't give is a coherent explanation of why the former approach is a poor one. What is actually better about survival analyses than linear models for analysing survival data?

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In brief:

  1. survival times tend to be skewed and heteroskedastic; survival models have that built in. You can do that with some GLMs (like say a gamma), but survival models tend to have more readily available choices. Even with no censoring at all I sometimes use survival models (e.g. for Weibull regression) when most people might think of a GLM.

  2. You don't expect to see location shifts in survival.

  3. If you can't observe the full survival time every time, you'll have some right censoring; again, you don't have to use a survival model with censoring, but it's got it built in.

  4. You're making fuller use of the available timing information. (If the bins are narrow that maybe won't matter such a lot.)

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