Survival Analysis Using SAS®: A Practical Guide

Repeated Events

All the models and analyses in the preceding chapters presume that no individual experiences more than one event. That’s a reasonable presumption if the event is a death. But most events in the social sciences are repeatable: births, marriages, job changes, promotions, arrests, residence changes, and so on. There are also many repeatable events that are of interest to biomedical scientists: tumor recurrences, seizures, urinary infections, and hospitalizations, to name only a few. Nevertheless, because so much of survival analysis has focused upon deaths, good methods for handling repeated events have been slow in coming. Several important developments have occurred in recent years, but little of that work has found its way into ...