Making a survival analysis can be a challenge even for experienced R users, but the good news is I’ll help you make beautiful, publication-quality survival plots in under 10-minutes. Here’s what WE are going to do:

1. Make your first survival model and plot your survival analysis with survminer
2. And I’ll give you 3 SPECIAL BONUSES! (that will take your survival plots to the next level).

You excited? I am! Let’s go!!

R-Tips Newsletter

This article is part of R-Tips Newsletter, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks.

Here are the links to get set up. 👇

• Get the Code
• YouTube Tutorial

Video Tutorial

Learn how to use the survminer package in my 8-minute YouTube video tutorial.

What you make in this R-Tip

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll make this survival analysis plot! AND, you’ll see how to expose business insights from customers that a churn faster than others.

Thank You Developers.

Before we move on, please recognize that survminer was developed by Alboukadel KASSAMBARA (follow on GitHub). Thank you for everything you do!

Also, the full documentation for survminer can be accessed here.

Survival Analysis Plot Tutorial

Buckle up. You and I are about to go on an 8-minute mind-blowing journey to make boring survival plots look insane. Let’s go.

Step 1: Load the libraries and data

First, run this code to:

1. Load Libraries: Load tidyverse , janitor, tidyquant, patchwork, survival, and survminer
2. Import Data: We have a custom dataset that has churn data. Sign up for R-Tips to get the dataset.

Here’s what the formatted customer churn data looks like.

Key concept about survival analysis!

For survival analysis, we want to understand how long it takes for an event to occur.

• How long: Tenure. This is how many months a customer has been subscribed.
• Survival Event: Churn = 1. This the event that connects the time to the death of a subscriber (they didn’t really die, but just unsubscribed).

With this knowledge, we can make our first survival model and plot.

Step 2: Make your 1st survival model and plot

Alright, we’re going to take care of 2 things in this step. They go hand-in-hand.

1. Survival Model: We’ll use the survfit() and Surv() functions to specify a survival model. We select the Surv(tenure, churn) to model the time and event. Then we use ~ contract to model as a function of contract type.
2. Survival Plot: We use ggsurvplot() to create our first survival plot.

This makes the plot shown below. It’s a very powerful plot for business insights!

How to explain the survival plot (business insights)

Newer data scientists can get tripped up interpreting and explaining the survival plot. So let me take a minute to explain in terms of the business insights.

The goal is to understand what’s happening. We can quickly see that:

• Month-to-Month Contracts are hurting the business. After 40-months, only 50% have survived (meaning that 50% have churned).
• Conversely, long-term contracts are really beneficial to the business. At 40-months, 90% of 1-year contracts have survived. These customers are more loyal! And 2-year customers are the most loyal!!

3 MASSIVE BONUSES!!! To take your survival plots to the NEXT LEVEL.

Don’t just willy-nilly slap the survival plot in your business report.

Avoid THIS big mistake

Here’s why you MUST AVOID just slapping the last plot in your business reports:

1. Remember, stakeholders are human and they won’t trust you or your report if you don’t dress it up!
2. You are measured by your ability to provide actionable insights. SO you need to be able to explore more. The techniques I will show you next will help you do just that!

So let’s earn the trust of your business leadership with these 3 MASSIVE BONUSES!!

Bonus #1: Use the Tidyquant Theme

I’m the creator of tidyquant. So I may be biased for telling you to use it. But, I’m biased for a reason. It got me results (job promotions and recognition).

Tidyquant includes special “business-ready” themes that I used in my reports (yes, the ones that went to my CEO of a $500,000,000 per year business).

And, these are the same reports that helped get me 3 promotions in 2-years (effectively doubling my salary).

And we can immediately see a positive effect of the before and after. You gain:

1. Gridlines to help estimate survival probabilities.
2. Better business-ready color palettes
3. Legend at bottom (more obvious legend location for people that view the plot first then want to understand what the colors mean second)

Bonus #2: Add the survival risk table

The survival risk table is a great way to include specific values of how many survived. The default returns a risk table with counts. But you can also specify risk.table = "percentage" to include percentages if that works better for your persuasive argument.

Note that in order to make this look amazing, we will split, format with tidyquant, then recombine with patchwork to make a killer visualization that will earn your boss’s respect.

Heck yeah!! Now we’re talking. Alright, I have one more survival plot bonus hack for you.

Bonus #3: Facetted survival plots

This is an amazing hack to showcase differences in groups between survival. There’s a new function called ggsurvplot_facet() that exposes facetting options to make subplots. Let’s check it out. We’ll showcase any differences between the customer’s gender (male vs female)

And here’s the visualization that is returned.

Now we can tell that both male and female seem to have the same rates. So we know that gender doesn’t seem to have a big effect on churn rates.

Recap

We learned how to use the survminer library to not only create awesome survival analysis plots that show off business insights and are publication-ready. Great work! But, there’s a lot more to becoming a data scientist.

If you’d like to become a data scientist (and have an awesome career, improve your quality of life, enjoy your job, and all the fun that comes along), then I can help with that.

Step 1: Watch my Free 40-Minute Webinar

Learning data science on your own is hard. I know because IT TOOK ME 5-YEARS to feel confident.

AND, I don’t want it to take that long for you.

So, I put together a FREE 40-minute webinar (a masterclass) that provides a roadmap for what worked for me.

Literally 5-years of learning, consolidated into 40-minutes. It’s jammed packed with value. I wish I saw this when I was starting… It would have made a huge difference.

Step 2: Take action

For my action-takers, if you are ready to take your skills to the next level and DON’T want to wait 5-years to learn data science for business, AND you want a career you love that earns you $100,000+ salary (plus bonuses), and you’d like someone to help you do this in UNDER 6-MONTHS or less….

Then I can help with that too. There’s a link in the FREE 40-minute webinar for a special price (because you are special!) and taking that action will kickstart your journey with me in your corner.

Get ready. The ride is wild. And the destination is AMAZING!