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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Survival Analysis in R for Public Health by Imperial College London

4.5
stars
304 ratings

About the Course

Welcome to Survival Analysis in R for Public Health! The three earlier courses in this series covered statistical thinking, correlation, linear regression and logistic regression. This one will show you how to run survival – or “time to event” – analysis, explaining what’s meant by familiar-sounding but deceptive terms like hazard and censoring, which have specific meanings in this context. Using the popular and completely free software R, you’ll learn how to take a data set from scratch, import it into R, run essential descriptive analyses to get to know the data’s features and quirks, and progress from Kaplan-Meier plots through to multiple Cox regression. You’ll use data simulated from real, messy patient-level data for patients admitted to hospital with heart failure and learn how to explore which factors predict their subsequent mortality. You’ll learn how to test model assumptions and fit to the data and some simple tricks to get round common problems that real public health data have. There will be mini-quizzes on the videos and the R exercises with feedback along the way to check your understanding. Prerequisites Some formulae are given to aid understanding, but this is not one of those courses where you need a mathematics degree to follow it. You will need basic numeracy (for example, we will not use calculus) and familiarity with graphical and tabular ways of presenting results. The three previous courses in the series explained concepts such as hypothesis testing, p values, confidence intervals, correlation and regression and showed how to install R and run basic commands. In this course, we will recap all these core ideas in brief, but if you are unfamiliar with them, then you may prefer to take the first course in particular, Statistical Thinking in Public Health, and perhaps also the second, on linear regression, before embarking on this one....

Top reviews

LA

Jul 2, 2020

Great course superb support and very clear professor. This course is a good motivator to continue to explore public health and statistics.

VD

Aug 26, 2019

Good and practical introduction to survival analysis. I liked the emphasis on how to deal with practical data sets and data problems.

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1 - 25 of 70 Reviews for Survival Analysis in R for Public Health

By Todd D

Nov 25, 2019

Overall, the series on Stats in Public Health was worthwhile, well-constructed, and very informative. This last course (survival analysis) was equally informative, but desperately needs attention to the course presentation. The video transcripts were still raw (there needs to be an easy way for students like me who created cleaned video transcripts to upload them), two of the Week 4 quizzes would not accept the correct answers generated by the current software release (answer key needs to be updated), and the course itself needs someone to spend a few hours looking for bugs, typos, and doing polishing. The content is great but the presentation undermines it. Still, I would recommend the series, the course, and the instructors to other students.

By Amir A H

May 16, 2019

There are few videos and too much text. The exercises have not been well prepared and some outcomes and results have not been discussed, in particular for different types of residuals in the last week.

By Deleted A

Mar 6, 2019

This course does not discuss different types of survival model such as competitive event models. It only discusses very basic ideas such as the hazard function and the cox model which could be discussed in like 20 minutes. There are a lot of unnecessary discussion around multivariate regression and missing values that belong to a course on regression analysis and not survival analysis. The R code is a bit faulty and could be improved. Overall, I don't think this could be a good course on survival analysis.

By Paco C

Jul 22, 2020

Very shallow and uninformative. Nothing that cannot be learned with a 30 minutes read plus another 30 minutes looking at the survival package in R. Certainly doesn't merit the cost of subscribing to the specialization

By Kenil C

Feb 8, 2020

I expected the course to be more in-depth about the theory about survival analysis, but it only covers the very basics and the exercises are simply copying-and-pasting some R statements and getting some p-values.

By Retham L

May 11, 2020

This course can be improved by fixing mistakes (especially the ones on quizzes), and instructors need to be more active on the forums and help students with questions.

By Sreya P

Jan 4, 2020

The course has been designed to cater to the requirement of budding public health professionals who want to enhance their skills beyond basic of epidemiology and biostatistics and gain a competitive edge.

By Victoria D

Aug 26, 2019

Good and practical introduction to survival analysis. I liked the emphasis on how to deal with practical data sets and data problems.

By SAVINO S

Sep 30, 2020

A bit thank you to Alex Bottle for planning this course in such a nice way. I completely agree on his choice to leave out as much algebra as possible, and i like his way to talk through all the topics with a simple (though precise) language. I'll be missing it when, in the future, i will try to find help or guidance in some forum or website full of formal statistical language (eg. just look at the R online help for functions)

Thanks a lot again. Now that i've finished this specialization i'm more confident in dealing with health data and, who know, i may embark in some advanced statistical course! ;)

By Merce G P

May 25, 2020

Very nice course to get an introduction on survival analysis in R.

Well organized combination of theory and practice.

Also very nice it you have previous experience on survival analysis with other software like STATA.

Keep in mind that it is for a beginner level and basically covers kaplan-meier and cox, that's all.

By Eleanor H

Jun 11, 2020

Great introduction to survival analysis, explaining key concepts in a simple and effective manner. The combination of videos, reading material and practical R sessions were a great variety and kept you engaged. Minimal prior knowledge required, and a great practical application. Would highly recommend this course!

By Nevin J

Feb 1, 2020

Brilliant course from the Imperial team taking you through survival analysis using R. Practical, applicable and well explained. I finally understood a topic that I have had trouble with. It builds upon foudnations and beautfilly builds as u progress. it uses assessments really well to test knowledge

By Qusai A K A A

Nov 26, 2020

I took the entire specialization, and I am delighted I did!

All 4 courses in this specialization are wonderfully designed for beginners such as myself to get into statistics and R!

A big thank you to both instructors, you did a great job!

By Lucas G

Nov 12, 2020

Excelente curso introductorio para el análisis de sobrevida! Repasa los conceptos básicos de manera muy didáctica y llevadera. 100% recomendable para aquellos que quieran iniciar el proceso de análisis de tiempo al evento!

By 朱永載

Dec 30, 2021

Good introduction to survival analysis! There are plenty of practices and after the course I am ready for real analysis in my study project!

By Lesaffre A

Jul 3, 2020

Great course superb support and very clear professor. This course is a good motivator to continue to explore public health and statistics.

By Xiyang S

May 10, 2020

Thanks the course team especailly the instructor presenting great martirals, hope to see more related courses with more mathematics in it!

By Assal h

Aug 2, 2019

Excellent course to learn about survival analysis, with very explicit explications of the application of the models on R

By Roxana P

Dec 29, 2020

Very well explained including aspects not commonly covered in other tutorials such as assumptions testing.

By Kaoma M M

May 30, 2020

Very enjoyable course, and simple but effective application using R which I know very well in my practice

By Gloria B

Mar 13, 2023

Very clear explanation of the basic concepts needed to approach survival analysis. Highly recommended.

By Dick N

Mar 10, 2023

This class is so interesting it helped me to add more knowledge in survival analysis in the case of R.

By Karina S

Nov 12, 2019

Great! It's very interesting! Thank you. I would like to find out about prediction based on Cox model

By Rahul R

Dec 31, 2020

The course is wonderful and very informative. Only feedback is the final quiz was pretty hard.

By Hương G P

May 22, 2020

Highly recommended. This course is very constructive and is a good start for R beginner.