Random Generation of Survival Times

Overview

rsurv is a lightweight package with minimal dependencies for randomly generating survival times efficiently and flexibly. Survival times can be randomly drawn from any survival distribution and all code is vectorized so that each individual can have their own survival function. Monte Carlo simulation studies that aim to simulate realistic data generating processes based on empirical data are an intended use case.

Installation

The package can be installed from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("hesim-dev/rsurv")

Usage

Survival times can be randomly drawn from arbitrary survival curves using the rsurv() function. Survival curves for multiple individuals are stored in objects of class survival_curves, which are just data frames in the format shown here:

library("rsurv")
sc <- example_survival_curves(n = 1000)
head(sc)

##         time id  survival
## 1 0.00000000  1 1.0000000
## 2 0.08333333  1 0.9791166
## 3 0.16666667  1 0.9586694
## 4 0.25000000  1 0.9386491
## 5 0.33333333  1 0.9190469
## 6 0.41666667  1 0.8998541

Random survival times for each individual can then be easily drawn:

sim <- rsurv(sc)
length(sim)

## [1] 1000

summary(sim)

##     Min.  1st Qu.   Median     Mean  3rd Qu.     Max. 
##  0.08333  0.83333  1.91667  3.08467  4.16667 24.08333