Event History Analysis

TL;DR: It is a good time for statisticians to take stock of their role and position regarding surveys, observational research in epidemiology and clinical studies, and whether conditional effects in the sample may be transported to desired target populations.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the issue of whether audit quality contracted by issuers at the time of going public is associated with post-IPO survival and found that audit quality is significantly related to post-'IPO time to failure both in isolation and in the presence of other covariates that influence firm survival.

Abstract: Events are occurrences in specific locations, time, and semantics that nontrivially impact either our society or the nature, such as earthquakes, civil unrest, system failures, pandemics, and crimes. It is highly desirable to be able to anticipate the occurrence of such events in advance to reduce the potential social upheaval and damage caused. Event prediction, which has traditionally been prohibitively challenging, is now becoming a viable option in the big data era and is thus experiencing rapid growth, also thanks to advances in high performance computers and new Artificial Intelligence techniques. There is a large amount of existing work that focuses on addressing the challenges involved, including heterogeneous multi-faceted outputs, complex (e.g., spatial, temporal, and semantic) dependencies, and streaming data feeds. Due to the strong interdisciplinary nature of event prediction problems, most existing event prediction methods were initially designed to deal with specific application domains, though the techniques and evaluation procedures utilized are usually generalizable across different domains. However, it is imperative yet difficult to cross-reference the techniques across different domains, given the absence of a comprehensive literature survey for event prediction. This article aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive survey of the technologies, applications, and evaluations of event prediction in the big data era. First, systematic categorization and summary of existing techniques are presented, which facilitate domain experts’ searches for suitable techniques and help model developers consolidate their research at the frontiers. Then, comprehensive categorization and summary of major application domains are provided to introduce wider applications to model developers to help them expand the impacts of their research. Evaluation metrics and procedures are summarized and standardized to unify the understanding of model performance among stakeholders, model developers, and domain experts in various application domains. Finally, open problems and future directions are discussed. Additional resources related to event prediction are included in the paper website: http://cs.emory.edu/∼lzhao41/projects/event_prediction_site.html.

TL;DR: Innovations in method, data, and computer technology have removed the traditional barriers to multistate modeling of life histories and the computation of informative lifecourse indicators.

TL;DR: In this article, the cross spectrum between two variables can be decomposed into two parts, each relating to a single causal arm of a feedback situation, and measures of causal lag and causal strength can then be constructed.

TL;DR: The art and science of cause and effect have been studied in the social sciences for a long time as mentioned in this paper, see, e.g., the theory of inferred causation, causal diagrams and the identification of causal effects.

TL;DR: This article proposes methods for combining estimates of the cause-specific hazard functions under the proportional hazards formulation, but these methods do not allow the analyst to directly assess the effect of a covariate on the marginal probability function.

Abstract: Preface.1. Introduction.1.1 Failure Time Data.1.2 Failure Time Distributions.1.3 Time Origins, Censoring, and Truncation.1.4 Estimation of the Survivor Function.1.5 Comparison of Survival Curves.1.6 Generalizations to Accommodate Delayed Entry.1.7 Counting Process Notation.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.2. Failure Time Models.2.1 Introduction.2.2 Some Continuous Parametric Failure Time Models.2.3 Regression Models.2.4 Discrete Failure Time Models.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.3. Inference in Parametric Models and Related Topics.3.1 Introduction.3.2 Censoring Mechanisms.3.3 Censored Samples from an Exponential Distribution.3.4 Large-Sample Likelihood Theory.3.5 Exponential Regression.3.6 Estimation in Log-Linear Regression Models.3.7 Illustrations in More Complex Data Sets.3.8 Discrimination Among Parametric Models.3.9 Inference with Interval Censoring.3.10 Discussion.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.4. Relative Risk (Cox) Regression Models.4.1 Introduction.4.2 Estimation of beta.4.3 Estimation of the Baseline Hazard or Survivor Function.4.4 Inclusion of Strata.4.5 Illustrations.4.6 Counting Process Formulas. 4.7 Related Topics on the Cox Model.4.8 Sampling from Discrete Models.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.5. Counting Processes and Asymptotic Theory.5.1 Introduction.5.2 Counting Processes and Intensity Functions.5.3 Martingales.5.4 Vector-Valued Martingales.5.5 Martingale Central Limit Theorem.5.6 Asymptotics Associated with Chapter 1.5.7 Asymptotic Results for the Cox Model.5.8 Asymptotic Results for Parametric Models.5.9 Efficiency of the Cox Model Estimator.5.10 Partial Likelihood Filtration.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.6. Likelihood Construction and Further Results.6.1 Introduction.6.2 Likelihood Construction in Parametric Models.6.3 Time-Dependent Covariates and Further Remarks on Likelihood Construction.6.4 Time Dependence in the Relative Risk Model.6.5 Nonnested Conditioning Events.6.6 Residuals and Model Checking for the Cox Model.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.7. Rank Regression and the Accelerated Failure Time Model.7.1 Introduction.7.2 Linear Rank Tests.7.3 Development and Properties of Linear Rank Tests.7.4 Estimation in the Accelerated Failure Time Model.7.5 Some Related Regression Models.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.8. Competing Risks and Multistate Models.8.1 Introduction.8.2 Competing Risks.8.3 Life-History Processes.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.9. Modeling and Analysis of Recurrent Event Data.9.1 Introduction.9.2 Intensity Processes for Recurrent Events.9.3 Overall Intensity Process Modeling and Estimation.9.4 Mean Process Modeling and Estimation.9.5 Conditioning on Aspects of the Counting Process History.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.10. Analysis of Correlated Failure Time Data.10.1 Introduction.10.2 Regression Models for Correlated Failure Time Data.10.3 Representation and Estimation of the Bivariate Survivor Function.10.4 Pairwise Dependency Estimation.10.5 Illustration: Australian Twin Data.10.6 Approaches to Nonparametric Estimation of the Bivariate Survivor Function.10.7 Survivor Function Estimation in Higher Dimensions.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.11. Additional Failure Time Data Topics.11.1 Introduction.11.2 Stratified Bivariate Failure Time Analysis.11.3 Fixed Study Period Survival Studies.11.4 Cohort Sampling and Case-Control Studies.11.5 Missing Covariate Data.11.6 Mismeasured Covariate Data.11.7 Sequential Testing with Failure Time Endpoints.11.8 Bayesian Analysis of the Proportional Hazards Model.11.9 Some Analyses of a Particular Data Set.Bibliographic Notes.Exercises and Complements.Glossary of Notation.Appendix A: Some Sets of Data.Appendix B: Supporting Technical Material.Bibliography.Author Index.Subject Index.