Parametric proportional hazards models with gamma frailty.- Alternatives for the frailty model.- Frailty distributions.- The semiparametric frailty model.- Multifrailty and multilevel models.- Extensions of the frailty model.

Readers will find in the pages of this book a treatment of the statistical analysis of clustered survival data. Such data are encountered in many scientific disciplines including human and veterinary medicine, biology, epidemiology, public health and demography. A typical example is the time to death in cancer patients, with patients clustered in hospitals. Frailty models provide a powerful tool to analyze clustered survival data. In this book different methods based on the frailty model are described and it is demonstrated how they can be used to analyze clustered survival data. All programs used for these examples are available on the Springer website.