A stochastic evolutionary model for survival dynamics

Abstract

The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis, traditionally employed in clinical trials and reliability analysis in engineering. In our model, the only implicit assumption made is that the longer an actor has been in the system, the more likely it is to have failed. We derive a power-law distribution for the process and provide preliminary empirical evidence for the validity of the model from two well-known survival analysis data sets.