Mean survival by ordered fractions of population with censored data

Abstract

We propose a novel approach for estimating mean survival time in the presence of censored data, in which we divide the population under study into survival-ordered fractions defined by a set of proportions, and compute the mean survival time for each fraction separately. Our approach provides a detailed picture of the distribution of the time variable while preserving the appealing interpretation of the mean. Our measure proves to be of great use in applications, particularly those where we are able to detect differences in mean survival across groups for certain fractions of the population that would have been overlooked using other available methods.