R help - Nov 2005 - R for reliability analysis (with censored samples)?

Hello,

first: I am a newbie to this list, so if this isn't the right place to
ask, thanks for pointing me to the right direction...

I'm  currently  working  on  adding a degree in RAMS engineering to my
general  engineering  education,  and  consequently  I'm  looking  for
software  to  get my future work done. This will have to handle mostly
right-/left-/intervall-censored  samples,  which  seems  to  be      a
non-trivial  feature  from what I've read and heard so far. Apart from
this, RAMS work will be only part of my job and I will be the only one
to do RAMS work in the (tiny) company I work for, so paying multi-kEUR
every  year  in  license  fees  for  some  commercial application will
probably  not be the preferred choice for us. So I'm planning to use R
together with Python and GNUmeric/OO Calc instead.

So here are the questions:

How suitable is R for this kind of work (reliability analysis)?

Does it handle (right-/left-/interval-)censored samples by default?

Are  there  any information sources (on- or off-line) dedicated to the
use of open-source software for reliability analysis and especially R?

TIA,

Sincerely,

Wolfgang Keller

-- 
P.S.: My From-address is correct

On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Wolfgang Keller wrote:
> So here are the questions:
>
> How suitable is R for this kind of work (reliability analysis)?
>
> Does it handle (right-/left-/interval-)censored samples by default?
>
The survreg() function in the "survival" package fits accelerated
failure
models to right/left/interval censored data.

 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle