R Folk: Please forgive what I'm sure is a fairly naïve question; I hope it's clear. A colleague and I have been doing a really simple one-off survival analysis, but this is an area with which we are not very familiar, we just happen to have gathered some data that needs this type of analysis. We've done quite a bit of reading, but answers escape us, even though the question below seems simple.
Considering the following example from ?survdiff: > survdiff(Surv(time, status) ~ pat.karno, data=lung) Call: survdiff(formula = Surv(time, status) ~ pat.karno, data = lung) n=225, 3 observations deleted due to missingness. N Observed Expected (O-E)^2/E (O-E)^2/V pat.karno=30 2 1 0.658 0.1774 0.179 pat.karno=40 2 1 1.337 0.0847 0.086 pat.karno=50 4 4 1.079 7.9088 8.013 pat.karno=60 30 27 15.237 9.0808 10.148 pat.karno=70 41 31 26.264 0.8540 1.027 pat.karno=80 51 39 40.881 0.0865 0.117 pat.karno=90 60 38 49.411 2.6354 3.853 pat.karno=100 35 21 27.133 1.3863 1.684 Chisq= 22.6 on 7 degrees of freedom, p= 0.00202 The p value here is for the entire group (right?). How do we go about determining the p value for the comparison of any four arbitrary groups in all combinations, say pat.karno = 40, 60, 80, and 100? We know (we think) that we can't just run the coxph analysis for the only the groups of interest, as the hazard ratio for any one group in an analysis with several groups is computed by holding the other groups at their average value, so the hazard ratio varies by the context. Seems like we need some sort of t-test or chi-squared test, but being mere chemists and molecular biologists, we don't quite see it and wouldn't trust ourselves anyway, given the special nature of survival analysis. Manual instructions or a function suggestion would be great. Thanks in Advance, Bryan ************* Bryan Hanson Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry DePauw University, Greencastle IN USA ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.