[R] survreg & gompertz

[Terry Therneau]

The short answer is "sort of".
Medium is that survreg implements the model framework found in Kalbfeisch and Prentice, 
The statistical analysis of failure time data, chapter, chapter 2.2.  The ime variable T has
    f(time) ~ X' beta +  sigma * W
where W is an error term from some distribution and f is a fixed function (usually 
identity or log).  Any distribution that can be shoehorned into this framework can be fit 
with survreg.

A longer and more detailed discussion is found in Division of Biostatistics Technical 
Report #53, Mayo Clinic,
"A package for survival analysis in S".   One day I need to update this and make it a 
vignette for the package....

    http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/research/biostat/techreports.cfm


   Terry Therneau

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Hi all,

Sorry if this has been answered already, but I couldn't find it in the
archives or general internet.

Is it possible to implement the gompertz distribution as
survreg.distribution to use with survreg of the survival library?
I haven't found anything and recent attempts from my side weren't
succefull so far.

I know that other packages like 'eha' and 'flexsurv' offer functions
similar to survreg with gompertz support. However, due to the run-time
environment were this needs to be running in the end, I can't use these
packages :(

Same questions for the gompertz-makeham distribution.

Many thanks!

Matthias