read_survival_data: Read and Prepare Survival Data

In BetaDanish: The Beta-Danish Distribution for Lifetime Data Analysis

Read and Prepare Survival Data

Description

A helper function to read survival data from CSV or Excel files and prepare it for analysis with the Beta-Danish package. It automatically handles missing status columns by assuming all observations are complete (uncensored).

Usage

read_survival_data(file, time_col, status_col = NULL, covar_cols = NULL)

Arguments

file	Character string specifying the path to the file.
time_col	Character string specifying the name of the time/survival column.
status_col	Character string specifying the name of the event/censoring indicator column. If 'NULL' (default), the function assumes all observations are uncensored and creates a status column filled with 1s.
covar_cols	Character vector specifying the names of covariate columns to keep. If 'NULL' (default), no covariates are kept.

Details

The function checks the file extension to determine how to read the data. For '.xlsx' or '.xls' files, the 'readxl' package must be installed. Missing values ('NA') in the specified columns will cause those rows to be dropped with a warning.

Value

A clean 'data.frame' containing the 'time', 'status', and any specified covariates, ready to be passed to 'fit_betadanish()'.

Examples

tmp <- tempfile(fileext = ".csv")
example_data <- data.frame(
  survival_time = c(5, 8, 12, 16),
  status = c(1, 1, 0, 1)
)
write.csv(example_data, tmp, row.names = FALSE)
dat <- read_survival_data(tmp, time_col = "survival_time", status_col = "status")
unlink(tmp)

BetaDanish documentation built on May 20, 2026, 5:07 p.m.