R help - Oct 2002 - help ! calculating relative mortality using survival5

Hi All,

I am relatively new to R (took a class 2 yrs ago ...), and am hoping someone can
point me in the right direction for a problem I'd like to solve in R :

I would like to calculate the relative mortality of a particular impairment,
relative to the standard population.

I.e. I'm trying to find S_relative(t) in the eqn below :

  S_impar(t) = S_standard(t) * S_relative(t)

where S_standard(t) is the mortality of the general population, and S_impar is
the mortality of the the impaired group under consideration.

Is doing something like this possible in R ?

I have a dataset for an impaired group containing survival time (x), and an
right-censoring indicator (ind), from which I can get the estimated survival
function S_impar(t), using something like fit<-survfit(Surv(x,ind)~1).

And from some statistics literature, I gather I can get what I want using
"ratetable", "survexp" and "offset".

But I've poured through the help files, but I still have some questions ...
specifically,

I have a table of probabilities of death on each day for each age for the
general population. How do I convert that into a table that ratetable can use ?
And how would I read in that table ? (i.e. How do I get S_standard(t) from the
table I have ?)

And what is the survfit function to use to calculate S_relative(t) ? 

Any ideas ? If someone has done something similar to this, I'd love to hear
their approach. Thanks you so much !

Roger



Roger Lee
Hannover Life Reassurance (Ireland) Ltd
4 Custom House Plaza, IFSC, Dublin 1, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 612-5872 Fax: +353 1 673-6917
roger.lee at hannover-re.com
http://www.hannoverlifere.com



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