frailty               package:survival               R Documentation

(Approximate) Frailty models

Description:

     When included in a coxph or survreg, fits by penalised likelihood
     a random effects (frailty) model. 'frailty' is generic, with
     methods for t, Gaussian and Gamma distributions.

Usage:

     frailty(x, distribution="gamma", ...)
     frailty.gamma(x, sparse = (nclass > 5), theta, df, eps = 1e-05, method = c("em","aic", "df", "fixed"), ...) 
     frailty.gaussian(x, sparse = (nclass > 5), theta, df, method = c("reml","aic", "df", "fixed"), ...)
     frailty.t(x, sparse = (nclass > 5), theta, df, eps = 1e-05, tdf = 5,method = c("aic", "df", "fixed"), ...)

Arguments:

       x: group indicator

distribution: frailty distribution 

     ...: Arguments for specific distribution, including (but not
          limited to) 

  sparse: Use sparse Newton-Raphson algorithm

      df: Approximate degrees of freedom

   theta: Penalty

     eps: Accuracy of 'df'

  method: maximisation algorithm

     tdf: df of t-distribution

Details:

     The penalised likelihood method is equivalent to maximum (partial)
     likelihood for the gamma frailty but not for the others.

     The sparse algorithm uses the diagonal of the information matrix
     for the random effects, which saves a lot of space. 

     The frailty distributions are really the log-t and lognormal: t
     and Gaussian are random effects on the scale of the linear
     predictor.

Value:

     An object of class 'coxph.penalty' containing a factor with
     attributes specifying the control functions.

References:

     Therneau TM, Grambsch PM, Pankratz VS (2003) "Penalized survival
     models and frailty" Journal of Computational and Graphical
     Statistics 12, 1: 156-175

See Also:

     'coxph','survreg','ridge','pspline'

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)
     coxph(Surv(time, status) ~ age + sex + frailty(id, dist='gauss', method='aic',caic=TRUE), kidney)
     # uncorrected aic
     coxph(Surv(time, status) ~ age + sex + frailty(id, method='aic', caic=FALSE), kidney)

     rfit2a <- survreg(Surv(time, status) ~ rx +
                       frailty.gaussian(litter, df=13, sparse=FALSE), rats )
     rfit2b <- survreg(Surv(time, status) ~ rx +
                       frailty.gaussian(litter, df=13, sparse=TRUE), rats )
     rfit2a
     rfit2b

