Practical exercise 1

 

In this exercise we will see how Nelson-Aalen plots may be used to study the effect of various covariates for the lung cancer data given at the course web-page.

 

a) Look at the commands given at course web-page for reading the data and computing Nelson-Aalen plots for all patients and separately for males and females. Perform these commands and interpret the results.

 

Make Nelson-Aalen plots according to the categorical covariates

b) actitvity score

c) anorexia

d) hoaresness

e) metastases

and interpret the plots.

 

Age is a numeric covariate. In order to make Nelson-Aalen plots that show the effect of age, we need to make a categorical covariate for age. This can be achieved by the command "cut" (give the command "help(cut)" to see how "cut" is working).

 

f) Make Nelson-Aalen plots that show the effect of age and interpret the plots.