The term ‘ competing risks’ refers to the situation when more than one type of failure can occur, and the observation of one type of failure hinders the observation of another. The need to understand, interpret and analyse competing risk data is key to the development of numerous areas of science. There are many research examples in which a specific type of failure is of interest, but practical issues make it extremely difficult to observe the time to the event of interest. Analyzing time to failure data in the presence of competing risks requires special statistical tools. "Compet...