Estimating the risk of events with stprisk

Abstract

Incidence rates are popular summary measures of the occurrence over time of events of interest. They are also called mortality rates or failure rates, depending on the context. The incidence rate is defined as the ratio between the total number of events and total follow-up time and can be estimated with the strate command. When the event of interest can occur multiple times on any given subject over a time period, like infections, the incidence rate represents an average count per unit of time, such as the average number of infections per year. When the event of interest can occur only once, such as death, an alternative summary measure is the risk, or probability, of occurrence per unit time, such as the risk of dying in one year. In this article, I present the stprisk command, which estimates risks, and illustrate its use and interpretation through a data example.