Survival models and health sequences

Understand

Medical investigations focusing on patient survival often generate not only a failure time for each patient but also a sequence of measurements on patient health at annual or semi-annual check-ups while the patient remains alive.

• Such a sequence of random length accompanied by a survival time is called a survival process.
• Ordinarily robust health is associated with longer survival, so the two parts of a survival process cannot be assumed independent.
• This paper is concerned with a general technique---time reversal---for constructing statistical models for survival processes.