pammtools: Piece-wise exponential Additive Mixed Modeling tools

06/04/2018

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by   Andreas Bender, et al.

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This article introduces the pammtools package, which facilitates data transformation, estimation and interpretation of Piece-wise exponential Additive Mixed Models. A special focus is on time-varying effects and cumulative effects of time-dependent covariates, where multiple past observations of a covariate can cumulatively affect the hazard, possibly weighted by a non-linear function. The package provides functions for convenient simulation and visualization of such effects as well as a robust and versatile function to transform time-to-event data from standard formats to a format suitable for their estimation. The models can be represented as Generalized Additive Mixed Models and estimated using the R package mgcv. Many examples on real and simulated data as well as the respective R code are provided throughout the article.