COMPARISON OF SURVIVAL ANALYSIS USING ACCELERATED FAILURE TIME MODEL AND COX MODEL FOR RECIDIVIST CASE

Abstract

Recidivists, or ex-prisoners who commit crimes after serving a prior sentence, pose a critical challenge to the criminal justice system. This study examines social and economic factors that may reduce the likelihood of recidivists being re-arrested. Using survival analysis, the probability that a recidivist could survive in society without being re-arrested could be estimated. The purpose of this work is to compare the AFT and Cox models to determine which provides a better fit to identify factors affecting the likelihood of re-arrest within one year after release and to statistically assess the impact of these factors. This study utilizes a stratified Cox model to address variables that violate the proportional hazards (PH) assumption. The analysis is limited to four types of AFT models: Weibull, log-normal, log-logistic, and exponential. Results show that the stratified Cox model provides the best fit, based on Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). This demonstrates the Cox model's robustness in analyzing survival data, accurately approximating the distribution of survival times without restrictive assumptions, unlike AFT models. The study reveals that recidivists who received financial aid upon release have a lower risk of re-arrest compared to those who did not, and each additional prior theft arrest increased the risk of re-arrest by 1.09193 times.