Accuracy of point predictions in survival analysis.

Henderson, Robin and Jones, M. and Stare, J. (2001) Accuracy of point predictions in survival analysis. Statistics in Medicine, 20 (20). pp. 3083-3096. ISSN 1097-0258

Abstract

Survival time prediction is important in many applications, particularly for patients diagnosed with terminal diseases. A measure of prediction error taken from the medical literature is advocated as a practicable method of quantifying reliability of point predictions. Optimum predictions are derived for familiar survival models and the accuracy of these predictions is investigated. We argue that poor predictive capability is inherent to standard survival models with realistic parameter values. A lung cancer example is used to illustrate difficulties in prediction in practice.