Green and Byar (1980) Prostate Cancer Data set from Andrews and Herzberg - Data

On 25/03/2009, at 10:04 AM, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:

Ravi Varadhan wrote:

Hi,

I am looking for a data set containing the information from a 
randomized trial evaluating the effect of DES (diethylsilbestrol) on 
multiple time-to-event endpoints, prostate cancer, CVD, and other 
causes.  The original source of this data is Green and Byar (1980).  
This is a popular competing risks problem that has subsequently been 
discussed in a number of statistical papers including Kay (1986).

Does anyone have a digital version of this data set?

This data is also presented in Andrews, D. F. and Herzberg, A. M. 
(1985). Data.   Does a digital version of all the data sets in A & H 
exist?

Thanks very much,
Ravi.

An R binary dataset is at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/Datasets

Note that there is something strange about the AP variable with a lot of
ties at some value near 1.0.  I have never been able to find any
documentation about this problem.  If you find any please let me know.

Out of idle curiosity I went to have a look at this data set.

I had problems.

(1) The given URL didn't work for me; when I clicked on it, I got an 
error 404.
But if I went to http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu I found a link to 
``Datasets'',
and clicking on that got me to some data sets.

(2) Scrolling down to ``Byar and Green prostate cancer data'' appeared 
to get
me to the right place.  But I couldn't see any signs of any ``R binary 
files''.

The available formats appear to be *.sav (SPSS?), *.sdd (???), and *.xls.

(3) I downloaded the prostate.xls file O.K.  But when I tried to read it 
in with
the read.xls() function from the gdata package, I got an error to the 
effect

 > X <- read.xls("prostate.xls")

Converting xls file to csv file... Done.
Reading csv file... Error in read.table(file = file, header = header, 
sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
  no lines available in input

I was able to ``open'' the prostate.xls file with the version of Excel 
available
on my Mac, save it as a *.csv file, and then read *that* in with read.csv()

What am I missing?  *Are* there ``R binary'' files lurking about that I 
am somehow
not seeing?  Why won't read.xls() work on this data set?

    cheers,

        Rolf Turner

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