How to create a histogram for censored data?

Music City Center 

Summary statistics can not be obtained if we are working with a censored dataset. Doing a histogram or box-plot is also not possible. In such cases we can fit a parametric distribution to the data. If the fit is good, summary statistics such as mean , median, standard deviation and percentiles can be calculated from the fitted distribution. The pivotal point of this paper is obtaining a histogram for censored data. Let, U be a censored observation. Let T be the time to death variable. Making use of the fitted distribution we can obtain the conditional distribution of T given T>U and we can also calculate the expected value of the conditional distribution. We replace U with the conditional mean. We repeat this for every censored observation. Thus, we obatin the complete dataset. Now histogram of the data can be obtained. We can superimpose the histogram with the density function of the fitted distribution. We will extend the idea to check on the goodness of fit of the fitted distribution.

censored data

survival analysis

histogram

conditional distribution 

Survey Research Methods Section