Subhasree Chatterjee explains the basics of survival analysis:
Survival analysis is a set of methods to analyze the ‘time to occurrence’ of an event. The response is often referred to as a failure time, survival time, or event time. These methods are widely used in clinical experiments to analyze the ‘time to death’, but nowadays these methods are being used to predict the ‘when’ and ‘why’ of customer churn or employee turnover as well.
The dependent variables for the analysis are generally two functions:
Read the whole thing. H/T R-Bloggers