Proportional hazards regression with tabular data
In eha: Event History Analysis

library(eha)
options(digits = 4, fig.width=8)

Cox regression is not very suitable in the analysis of huge data sets with a lot of events (e.g., deaths). For instance, consider analyzing the mortality of the Swedish population aged 60--110 during the years 1968-2019, where we can count to more than four million deaths.

The obvious way to handle that situation is by tabulation and applying a piecewise constant hazard function, because it is a well-known fact that any continuous function can arbitrary well be approximated by a step function, simply by taking small enough steps.

Tabular data

The data sets swepop and swedeaths in eha contain age and sex specific yearly information on population size and number of deaths, respectively. They both cover the full Swedish population the years 1968--2019.

The first few rows of each:

head(swepop)
head(swedeaths)

The funny rownames and the column id are created by the function reshape, which was used to transform the original tables, given in wide format, to long format. In the original data, downloaded from Statistics Sweden, the population size refers to the last day, December 31, of the given year, but here it refers to an average of that value and the corresponding one the previous year. In that way we get an estimate of the number of person years, which allows us to consider number of occurrences and exposure time in each cell of the data. This information will allow us to fit proportional hazards survival models. So we start by joining the two data sets and remove irrelevant stuff:

dat <- swepop[, c("age", "sex", "year", "pop")]
dat$deaths <- swedeaths$deaths
rownames(dat) <- 1:NROW(dat) # Simplify rownames.
head(dat)
tail(dat)

We note that the age column ends with age == 100, which in fact means age >= 100. There are in total r sum(dat$deaths) observed deaths during the years 1968--2019, or r as.integer(round(sum(dat$deaths) / (2019 - 1967))) deaths per year on average. There are 101 age groups, two sexes, and 52 years, in all 10504 cells (rows in the data frame).

Poission regression

Assuming a piecewise constant hazards model on the 101 age groups, we can fit a proportional hazards model by Poisson regression, utilizing the fact that two likelihood functions in fact are identical. In R, we use glm.

fit.glm <- glm(deaths ~ offset(log(pop)) + I(year - 2000) + sex + 
                 factor(age), data = dat, family = poisson)
summary(fit.glm)$coefficients[2:3, ]

The 101 coefficients corresponding to the intercept and the age factor can be used to estimate the hazard function: The intercept, r fit.glm$coefficients[1], is the log of the hazard in the age interval 0-1, and the rest are differences to that value, so we can reconstruct the baseline hazard by

lhaz <- coefficients(fit.glm)[-(2:3)]
n <- length(lhaz)
lhaz[-1] <- lhaz[-1] + lhaz[1]
haz <- exp(lhaz)

and plot the result, see Figure \@ref(fig:glmbasefig).

oldpar <- par(las = 1, lwd = 1.5, mfrow = c(1, 2))
plot(0:(n-1), haz, type = "s", main = "log(hazards)", 
     xlab = "Age", ylab = "", log = "y")
plot(0:(n-1), haz, type = "s", main = "hazards", 
     xlab = "Age", ylab = "Deaths / Year")

par(oldpar) # Restore the default

The tpchreg function

While it straightforward to use glm and Poisson regression to fit the model, it takes some efforts to get it right. That is the reason for the creation of the function tpchreg ("Tabular Piecewise Constant Hazards REGression"), and with it, the "Poisson analysis" is performed by

fit <- tpchreg(oe(deaths, pop) ~ I(year - 2000) + sex, 
               time = age, last = 101, data = dat)

Note:

The function oe ("occurrence/exposure") takes two arguments, the first is the number of events (deaths in our example), and the second is exposure time, or person years.
The argument time is the defining time intervals variable. It can be either character, like c("0-1", "1-2", ..., "100-101") or numeric (as here). If numeric, the value refers to the start of the corresponding interval, and the next start is the end of the previous interval. This leaves the last interval's endpoint undefined, and if not given by the last argument (see below), it is chosen so that the length of the last interval is one.
The argument last closes the last interval, if is not already closed, see above. The exact value of last is only important for plotting and for the calculation of the restricted mean survival time, (RMST) see the summary result below.

summary(fit)

The restricted mean survival time is defined as the integral of the survivor function over the given time interval. Note that if the lower limit of the interval is larger than zero, it gives the conditional restricted mean survival time, given survival to the lower endpoint.

Graphs of the hazards and the log(hazards) functions are shown in Figure \@ref(fig:tpplot).

oldpar <- par(mfrow = c(1, 2), las = 1, lwd = 1.5)
plot(fit, fn = "haz", log = "y", main = "log(hazards)", 
     xlab = "Age")
plot(fit, fn = "haz", log = "", main = "hazards", 
     xlab = "Age", ylab = "Deaths / Year")

Same results as with glm and Poisson regression, but a lot simpler.

Tabulating standard survival data

Sometimes you have a large data file in classical, individual form, suitable for Cox regression with coxreg, but the mere size makes it impractical, or even impossible. Then help is close by tabulating and assuming a piecewise constant hazard function, returning to the method in the previous section, that is, using tpchreg.

The helper function is toTpch, and we illustrate its use on the oldmort data frame:

head(oldmort[, c("enter", "exit", "event", "sex", "civ", "birthdate")])
oldmort$birthyear <- floor(oldmort$birthdate) - 1800
om <- toTpch(Surv(enter, exit, event) ~ sex + civ + birthyear, 
             cuts = seq(60, 100, by = 2), data = oldmort)
head(om)

Note two things:

The creation of a new variable, birthyear. The original birthdate is given with precision days and contains r length(unique(oldmort$birthdate)) unique values, which will contribute to creating a very large table, so the transformation gives birth year with r length(unique(oldmort$birthyear)) unique values. Further, the new variable is given a reference value of 1800 by subtraction, necessary so that the baseline does not coincide with the birth of Christ. Will foremost affect plotting of the estimated survivor function. However, regression parameter estimates are unaffected, as long as no interaction effect including birthyear is present.
The length of the time pieces is set to two years, in order to avoid empty intervals in the upper age range. This choice has only a marginal effect on the final results of the analyses. You can try it out yourself. Note that it is not necessary to use equidistant cut points, it is chosen here only for convenience.

Now we can run tpchreg as before

fit3 <- tpchreg(oe(event, exposure) ~ sex + civ + 
                  birthyear, time = age, data = om)
summary(fit3)

And the hazards graphs are shown in Figure \@ref(fig:plotom).

oldpar <- par(mfrow = c(1, 2), las = 1, lwd = 1.5)
plot(fit3, fn = "haz", log = "y", main = "log(hazards)", 
     xlab = "Age", ylab = "log(Deaths / Year)", col = "blue")
plot(fit3, fn = "haz", log = "", main = "hazards", 
     xlab = "Age", ylab = "Deaths / Year", col = "blue")

The plots of the survivor and cumulative hazards functions are "smoother", see Figure \@ref(fig:plotsurcum).

oldpar <- par(mfrow = c(1, 2), las = 1, lwd = 1.5)
plot(fit3, fn = "cum", log = "y", main = "Cum. hazards", 
     xlab = "Age", col = "blue")
plot(fit3, fn = "sur", log = "", main = "Survivor function", 
     xlab = "Age", col = "blue")
par(oldpar)

A comparison with Cox regression on the original data.

fit4 <- coxreg(Surv(enter, exit, event) ~ sex + civ + I(birthdate - 1800), 
               data = oldmort)
summary(fit4)

And the graphs, see Figure \@ref(fig:coxgraphs).

oldpar <- par(mfrow = c(1, 2), lwd = 1.5, las = 1)
plot(fit4, main = "Cumulative hazards", xlab = "Age", 
     col = "blue")
plot(fit4, main = "Survivor function", xlab = "Age", 
     fn = "surv", col = "blue")