Survival analysis covers a broad range of topics. Here is the list of topics that we will cover in this chapter:
- Survival analysis
- Time-based variables and regression
- R survival objects
- Customer attrition or churn
- Survival curves
- Cox regression
- Plotting methods
- Variable selection
- Model concordance
Often, predictive analytic problems deal with various situations concerning the tracking of important events along a customer's journey, and predicting when these events will occur. Survival analysis is a form of analysis that is based upon the concept of time to event. The time to event is simply the number of units of time that have elapsed until something happens. The event can be just about anything; a car crash, a stock market crash, or a devastating phenomenon.
Survival analysis originated in the studying of patients who developed terminal diseases, such as cancer, hence the term survival. However, conceptually, it can even be applied to marketing applications in which you...
