KMPlot

Plot the Kaplan-Meier estimation of the survival function

Description

Survival times are data that measure follow-up time from a defined starting point to the occurrence of a given event, for example the time from the beginning to the end of a remission period or the time from the diagnosis of a disease to death. Standard statistical techniques cannot usually be applied because the underlying distribution is rarely Normal and the data are often ‘censored’. A survival time is described as censored when there is a follow-up time but the event has not yet occurred or is not known to have occurred. For example, if remission time is being studied and the patient is still in remission at the end of the study, then that patient’s remission time would be censored. If a patient for some reason drops out of a study before the end of the study period, then that patient’s follow-up time would also be considered to be
censored. The survival function S(t) is defined as the probability of surviving at least to time t. The graph of S(t) against t is called the survival curve. The Kaplan–Meier method can be used to estimate this curve from the observed survival times without the assumption of an underlying probability distribution. This function uses the vectorization technique.

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• Required Products: Statistics Toolbox
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)