Joint Models for Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Data

"""Overall, the book provides a nice introduction to joint models and the R package ""JM"". It is well written, readable, and comprehensive. With the availability of the R package for joint models, it is expected that joint models will become increasingly popular in practice, especially in medical research. In summary, the book makes an important contribution to the research and application of joint models."" —Lang Wu, Department of Statistics, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, in the Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics ""The book is well written in a matter-of-fact style that makes even unfamiliar readers understand the concept of joint models and furthermore provides them with a guide for getting started with their own analysis. The more joint model-savvy reader will, on the other hand, find inspiration for further foraging into the subject of model extensions, diagnostics, prediction, and accuracy. … a handy guide for anyone with a need to analyze survival data in the presence of a time-dependent covariate that is measured several times. As the author incorporates a longitudinal model for such a covariate into the relative risk regression modeling framework, we observe the advantage of being able to account for measurement errors within our covariate; a fortification of our research outcomes. All in all a satisfying book on joint models with a solid payout for fellow researchers."" —Maral Saadati, Biometrical Journal, 55, 2013 ""This new addition to the genre is based on the JM package written by the author and has been done well. … I particularly liked the sections on numerical methods, which manage to give a useful overview of what the package is actually doing but without scaring off the mathematically reluctant. The dreaded problem of non-convergence is met head-on, with an illustration and discussion of how a little knowledge of the fitting algorithms can help to overcome such problems. This alone is worth the price of the book! … To summarize, this is a very well-crafted introduction to an active research area that I would recommend to anyone interested in getting into this field or in learning to analyze such data."" —Geoff Jones, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics, 2013 ""The book is well written in a matter-of-fact style that makes even unfamiliar readers understand the concept of joint models and furthermore provides them with a guide for getting started with their own analysis. The more joint model-savvy reader will, on the other hand, find inspiration for further foraging into the subject of model extensions, diagnostics, prediction, and accuracy. … a handy guide for anyone with a need to analyze survival data in the presence of a time-dependent covariate that is measured several times. As the author incorporates a longitudinal model for such a covariate into the relative risk regression modeling framework, we observe the advantage of being able to account for measurement errors within our covariate; a fortification of our research outcomes. All in all a satisfying book on joint models with a solid payout for fellow researchers."" —Maral Saadati, Biometrical Journal, 55, 2013 ""This new addition to the genre is based on the JM package written by the author and has been done well. … I particularly liked the sections on numerical methods, which manage to give a useful overview of what the package is actually doing but without scaring off the mathematically reluctant. The dreaded problem of non-convergence is met head-on, with an illustration and discussion of how a little knowledge of the fitting algorithms can help to overcome such problems. This alone is worth the price of the book! … To summarize, this is a very well-crafted introduction to an active research area that I would recommend to anyone interested in getting into this field or in learning to analyze such data."" —Geoff Jones, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics, 2013"