Shared Frailty Model for Clustered Survival Data

The shared frailty model, introduced by Vaupel, Manton, and Stallard in 1979, extends standard survival regression by incorporating a random effect — the 'frailty' — that captures unobserved heterogeneity among subjects or clusters. When survival outcomes are measured on individuals who share a common environment (patients in the same hospital, members of the same family, animals in the same litter), a frailty term accounts for the within-cluster dependence that ordinary Cox regression ignores.