title: Counts and times to events.
abstract: A common response recorded in medical statistics involves the occurrence of events. Often this is summarized as a count for each patient. Reasons are given for disaggregating the data as much as possible and instead studying the time to each event. Global counts may hide evolution of the state of the patient over time. This will appear as overdispersion which may wrongly be interpreted as differential frailty among patients. Interval censoring is only important if the rate of events is very high as compared to the time unit of observation chosen. Repeated times to events on the same patient will be interrelated and so should be appropriately treated, as for any repeated measure. Both serial dependence among successive times to events on the same patient and frailty among patients may be present.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Statistics, De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K. jlindsey@dmu.ac.uk
authors.forename: J K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Lindsey
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D015982:Bias; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D016015:Logistic Models; D011897:Random Allocation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012107:Research Design; D016019:Survival Analysis; D013997:Time Factors