KMstability: R tools to report the stability and precision of Kaplan–Meier estimates as well as measures of follow-up in time-to-event studies

Abstract

In order to appropriately report time-to-event analyses by means of Kaplan–Meier estimates, its precision and stability should be described. The precision is often reported by confidence intervals. For reporting the stability, various measures of the follow-up time distribution are used. However, these do not provide the intended insight. Recently, a new stability measure was presented. We have developed the software KMstability for calculation and display of this stability measure, including a user-friendly R shiny application and an open-source R package. The software enables informative reporting of time-to-event analysis. This is essential for reporting time-to-event analyses at interim-analyses of clinical trials and for observational (real-world-data) studies.

Keywords

• Time to censoring
• Observation time
• Observation time for those who are event-free
• Product limit estimator
• Statistical software
• Kaplan Meier estimator