Hi, I was reading a paper published in JCO "Prediction of risk of distant recurrence using 21-gene recurrence score in node-negative and node-positive postmenopausal patients with breast cancer treated with anastrozole or tamoxifen: a TransATAC study" (ICO 2010 28: 1829). The author uses a method to estimate the 9-year risk of distant recurrence as a function of continuous recurrence score (RS). The method is special as author states: "To define the continuous relation between RS, as a linear covariate, and 9-year risk of distant recurrence, the logarithm of the baseline cumulative hazard function was fitted by constrained cubic splines with 3 df. These models tend to be more robust for prediction of survival probabilities and corresponding confidence limits at late follow-up time as a result of the modeling of the baseline cumulative hazard function by natural cubic splines (in contrast to using the crude hazard function itself)." Does R provide a package/function to do this particular method for estimating survival probability as a function of a continuous variable? Is the survest.cph() in rms package doing estimation with just the crude hazard function? Thanks very much! John
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