How to plot the survival curve generated by survreg (package survival of R)?

rm. picture rm. · Feb 5, 2012 · Viewed 28.2k times · Source

I’m trying to fit and plot a Weibull model to a survival data. The data has just one covariate, cohort, which runs from 2006 to 2010. So, any ideas on what to add to the two lines of code that follows to plot the survival curve of the cohort of 2010?

library(survival)
s <- Surv(subSetCdm$dur,subSetCdm$event)
sWei <- survreg(s ~ cohort,dist='weibull',data=subSetCdm)

Accomplishing the same with the Cox PH model is rather straightforward, with the following lines. The problem is that survfit() doesn’t accept objects of type survreg.

sCox <- coxph(s ~ cohort,data=subSetCdm)
cohort <- factor(c(2010),levels=2006:2010)
sfCox <- survfit(sCox,newdata=data.frame(cohort))
plot(sfCox,col='green')

Using the data lung (from the survival package), here is what I'm trying to accomplish.

#create a Surv object
s <- with(lung,Surv(time,status))

#plot kaplan-meier estimate, per sex
fKM <- survfit(s ~ sex,data=lung)
plot(fKM)

#plot Cox PH survival curves, per sex
sCox <- coxph(s ~ as.factor(sex),data=lung)
lines(survfit(sCox,newdata=data.frame(sex=1)),col='green')
lines(survfit(sCox,newdata=data.frame(sex=2)),col='green')

#plot weibull survival curves, per sex, DOES NOT RUN
sWei <- survreg(s ~ as.factor(sex),dist='weibull',data=lung)
lines(survfit(sWei,newdata=data.frame(sex=1)),col='red')
lines(survfit(sWei,newdata=data.frame(sex=2)),col='red')

Answer

tim riffe picture tim riffe · Feb 6, 2012

Hope this helps and I haven't made some misleading mistake:

copied from above:

    #create a Surv object
    s <- with(lung,Surv(time,status))

    #plot kaplan-meier estimate, per sex
    fKM <- survfit(s ~ sex,data=lung)
    plot(fKM)

    #plot Cox PH survival curves, per sex
    sCox <- coxph(s ~ as.factor(sex),data=lung)
    lines(survfit(sCox,newdata=data.frame(sex=1)),col='green')
    lines(survfit(sCox,newdata=data.frame(sex=2)),col='green')

for Weibull, use predict, re the comment from Vincent:

    #plot weibull survival curves, per sex,
    sWei <- survreg(s ~ as.factor(sex),dist='weibull',data=lung)

    lines(predict(sWei, newdata=list(sex=1),type="quantile",p=seq(.01,.99,by=.01)),seq(.99,.01,by=-.01),col="red")
    lines(predict(sWei, newdata=list(sex=2),type="quantile",p=seq(.01,.99,by=.01)),seq(.99,.01,by=-.01),col="red")

plot output

The trick here was reversing the quantile orders for plotting vs predicting. There is likely a better way to do this, but it works here. Good luck!