Customer Reviews

Survival Analysis Using SAS: A Practical Guide

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I've used a number of this author's books and they all share in common lucidity, utility, and rigor. This book makes it easy to grasp complex ideas, provides comprehensible examples, gives sample SAS code so that implementing the methods is as straightforward as possible. Plus, it is clear that the author is a subtle and first-rate methodologist, who innovates in this area as well as teaches it.

If you have data that fit the general category "time to event," and are not suitably analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA, you are probably looking at doing a survival analysis (also known by several other names). If you are working largely on your own, and you learn best by doing, you cannot--as far as I know--do better than Allison's book. Of course it all but locks you into using SAS for analyses, but his explanations of proportional hazards and other models are the best I've found among a dozen textbooks and stats package manuals (some of which made sense only after reading Allison). What makes this book so good is that it will have you running your analyses in just hours. The examples are superb take-off points. I was not a SAS user before reading the book and therefore took a little extra time to figure out dataset manipulations and such in SAS, but that was minor effort compared to the rewards of having Allison's clearly written book as a guide. The price of this book represents only a fraction of its value.

This book is well-written, well-organized, and very practical. I found it invaluable in conducting my research. My only recommendation for the author for his next edition is to include a chapter on dealing with correlated event times, like time-to-promotion and time-to-quiting in his policemen example (pg 249).

So far, this book has been a useful reference for survival analysis. It is clearly written and the xplanatins are understandable and helpful. It would be nice to have a newer edition that addresses changes in later versions of SAS.

I never took a survival course in college but had to do some analyses for work. This book had the right amount of theory to understand everything and showed how to perform the analyses in SAS wonderfully. I pull out this book every time I have to do a survival analysis and always find what I need. Highly recommend.

This is a wonderful SAS methods book with handy code you want to keep close to your keyboard. It provides by far the best elucidation, from a programming perspective, of how to manipulate time-dependent covariates. I just wish the author and his publisher, the SAS Institute, would update this edition to the more recent releases of SAS.

This is by far the best SAS book I own (and I have a whole shelf full). I have made use of it repeatedly. The examples are excellent. This is definitely a methods book, not a theory book, but the presentation of the statistical concepts is clear and easy to follow and apply.