Final answer:
Kaplan-Meier is a survival analysis used to estimate the probability of an event, such as death or failure of a treatment, occurring over a specific time period. It is essential in medical research for comparing survival rates between groups and can also relate to studying patterns of survival in different species exemplified by various survivorship curves.
Step-by-step explanation:
Kaplan-Meier is a survival analysis that denotes the probability of experiencing an event over time. The correct answer to fill in the blanks would be a. survival; event. This statistical method is widely used in medical research to estimate the survival probability of patients over time, taking into account the time at which each individual may be censored.
Kaplan-Meier curves are essential for analyzing and visualizing the survival experiences of different groups within a study, for instance, comparing the effectiveness of different treatments. By categorizing the subjects into groups, like age groups or treatment groups, researchers can observe the number of individuals that survive or exhibit the event of interest within specific time intervals. This aligns with practices such as constructing life tables and calculating mortality rates at different ages, which can help to validate hypotheses regarding the mortality rate during different developmental periods.
Moreover, Kaplan-Meier curves are related to the concept of survivorship curves. For example, different species may exhibit distinctive patterns of survival represented by Type I, Type II, or Type III survivorship curves. Humans typically follow a Type I curve where most individuals survive to an older age, which contrasts with species that have high mortality rates in early life (Type III curve)