Relative survival techniques are used to compare the survival experience in a study cohort with the one expected should they follow the background population mortality rates. The techniques are especially useful when the cause-specific death information is not accurate or not available since they provide a measure of excess mortality in a group of patients with a certain disease. There are several approaches to modeling relative survival, but there is no widely used statistical package that would incorporate the relevant techniques. The exist- ing software was mostly written by the authors of different methods, in different computer languages and with different requirements for the data input, which makes it almost im- possible for a user to choose between available models. We describe our R package relsurv that provides functions for easy and flexible fitting of several relative survival regression models.
['Maja Pohar', 'Janez Stare']
Relative survival analysis in R.