ggsurvfit

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Introduction

The ggsurvfit package eases the creation of time-to-event (aka survival) summary figures with ggplot2. The concise and modular code creates images that are ready for publication or sharing. Competing risks cumulative incidence is also supported via ggcuminc().

Why ggsurvfit?

Installation

Install ggsurvfit from CRAN with:

install.packages("ggsurvfit")

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("pharmaverse/ggsurvfit")

Examples

Review the figure gallery for many more examples.

The code below constructs a basic {ggsurvfit} figure without customization.

library(ggsurvfit)
#> Loading required package: ggplot2

p <- survfit2(Surv(time, status) ~ surg, data = df_colon) |>
  ggsurvfit(linewidth = 1) +
  add_confidence_interval() +
  add_risktable() +
  add_quantile(y_value = 0.6, color = "gray50", linewidth = 0.75) +
  scale_ggsurvfit()

Any figure created with {ggsurvfit} can be customized using {ggplot2} functions.

p +
  # limit plot to show 8 years and less
  coord_cartesian(xlim = c(0, 8)) +
  # update figure labels/titles
  labs(
    y = "Percentage Survival",
    title = "Recurrence by Time From Surgery to Randomization",
  )

survfit2() vs survfit()

Both functions have identical inputs, so why do we need survfit2()? The survfit2() tracks the environment from which the function was called, resulting in the following benefits.

CDISC ADaM ADTTE

The package also includes gems for those using the CDISC ADaM ADTTE v1.0 data model.

If columns "PARAM" or "PARAMCD" are present in the data frame passed to survfit2(), their values will be used to construct default labels in the ggsurvfit() figure.

The event indicator in ADTTE data sets is named "CNSR" and is coded in the opposite way the survival package expects outcomes—1 = 'censored' and 0 = 'event'. This difference creates an opportunity for errors to be introduced in an analysis. The ggsurvfit package exports a function called Surv_CNSR() to resolve this concern. The function creates a survival object (e.g. survival::Surv()) that uses CDISC ADaM ADTTE coding conventions as the default values. The function can be used in ggsurvfit as well as any other package that uses survival::Surv().

survfit(Surv_CNSR() ~ 1, adtte)
#> Call: survfit(formula = Surv_CNSR() ~ 1, data = adtte)
#> 
#>         n events median 0.95LCL 0.95UCL
#> [1,] 2199    755    3.2     3.1    3.56