Kaplan-Meier Estimator

The Kaplan-Meier estimator, also known as the product limit estimator, is a non-parametric statistic used to estimate the survival function from lifetime data. It is most often used in medical research to measure how long patients survive after a treatment, but it applies equally to other time to event data such as the duration of unemployment, the failure rate of machine parts, or the time before fruit is removed from a plant by animals. The method is credited to Edward L. Kaplan and Paul Meier, who had separately submitted similar work to the Journal of the American Statistical Association; the journal's editor, John Tukey, persuaded them to combine their work into the single 1958 paper that introduced the estimator, which has since been cited more than 34,000 times. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/