{
  "slug": "competing-risks",
  "term": "Competing risks",
  "aliases": [
    "Competing events"
  ],
  "definition": "Competing risks are mutually exclusive first-event types for which occurrence of one prevents the others from being the first event in the defined process.",
  "note": "For a storage cohort whose endpoint is failure before permanent withdrawal from service, documented retirement is a competing event; study end is censoring. This is a modeling example, not a classification of every disappearance in a drive log. [therneau-competing] A hypothetical lifetime under continued service is a different target: merely censoring retired drives does not identify it without further assumptions. Unknown gaps and temporary removal need separate handling. [andersen-competing]",
  "related": [
    "cumulative-incidence-function",
    "cause-specific-hazard",
    "right-censoring",
    "informative-censoring"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "therneau-competing",
      "title": "Therneau, Crowson and Atkinson: Multi-state models and competing risks (12 January 2026), sections 2.1-2.2 and 3",
      "url": "https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/survival/doc/compete.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-16"
    },
    {
      "id": "andersen-competing",
      "title": "Andersen, Geskus, de Witte and Putter (2012): Competing risks in epidemiology: possibilities and pitfalls, DOI 10.1093/ije/dyr213",
      "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3396320/",
      "accessed": "2026-10-16"
    }
  ],
  "status": "shipping",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-10-16"
}