Challenges in the development of prognostic models utilising clinical trials data

Methods Using data from two clinical trials in advanced stage pancreatic cancer, a prognostic model was developed using Royston-Parmar (R-P) flexible parametric survival models. R-P models use restricted cubic splines to model the baseline hazard function for time-to-event data and thereby allows absolute risk to be predicted for individuals. This contrasts the Cox regression approach which does not explicitly model the baseline hazard function.