Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is censored data?

Status = 1: Dead

Status = 0: Censored.

In biological terms, this is an individual that was alive at this point, but went missing from this dataset.

Some common lab examples that come to mind:

  • A fly that escaped when uncapping the vial
  • A fly that was accidentally squished when transferring vials
  • A fly that was stuck in the food because you forgot to change the vial
  • A worm that crawled into the abyss that is an agar crack

Basically, if an individual was alive up till that point, and died/disappeared due to a reason other than natural causes, we refer to it as a censored datapoint.

What is bulk survival analysis?

In bulk survival analysis, researchers place a certain number of organisms in a vial, and count the number of organisms that are dead/censored on any particular day. This produces a “one row, multiple individuals” data format, which is not compatible with most R survival packages (eg survival and survminer):

condition day dead censored
WT 10 2 0
WT 12 0 2

…