Time-to-event data are ubiquitous in fields such as medicine, biology, demography, sociology, economics and reliability theory. Recently, a need to analyze more complex event histories has emerged. Examples are individuals that move among several states, frailty that makes some units fail before others, internal time-dependent covariates, and the estimation of causal effects from observational data.

The aim of this book is to bridge the gap between standard textbook models and a range of models where the dynamic structure of the data manifests itself fully. The common denominator of...

..... object oriented seems to be becoming in the 1980s what structured programming was in the 1970s. Brian Randell and Pete Lee This quotation is from the invitation to the annual Newcastle University Conference on Main Trends in Computing, September 1988. It seems to capture the situation quite well, only that the object orientation is being materialised in languages and language constructs, as well as in the style of programming and as a perspective upon the task considered. The second European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP 88) was held in Oslo, Norway, August 15-17,...