ANALYSIS OF DEPENDENT SURVIVAL-DATA APPLIED TO LIFETIMES OF AMALGAM FILLINGS

When studying lifetimes of amalgam fillings, one is faced with the fact that each patient may contribute multiple survival data. This creates a dependence problem, and some methods for solving it are presented here. Analysis for individual patients with simple approaches for combining data is discussed first. Then a parametric frailty model is applied to analyse variation within and between patients. The results are presented in the form of an empirical Bayes estimate for each patient.