The accelerated failure time model: a useful alternative to the Cox regression model in survival analysis.

For the past two decades the Cox proportional hazards model has been used extensively to examine the covariate effects on the hazard function for the failure time variable. On the other hand, the accelerated failure time model, which simply regresses the logarithm of the survival time over the covariates, has seldom been utilized in the analysis of censored survival data. In this article, we review some newly developed linear regression methods for analysing failure time observations. These procedures have sound theoretical justification and can be implemented with an efficient numerical method. The accelerated failure time model has an intuitive physical interpretation and would be a useful alternative to the Cox model in survival analysis.