Background on Survival Analysis
The origins of survival analysis can be traced back to a paper published in 1693 by Edmund Halley, as described in the aside “An Early History of Survival Analysis.” The techniques were developed further in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly for applications in social sciences, industrial process control, and medical research. These applications necessarily used a small amount of data because all data was collected by hand. A typical medical study, for instance, has dozens or hundreds of participants, rather than the multitudes of customers whose information is stored in today’s databases.
This section shows some examples of survival analysis without strictly defining terms such as hazard probabilities and survival. The examples start with life expectancy, then an explanation of survival in the medical realm, and finally give an example of hazard probabilities and how they shed light on customer behavior.