Hi, I have noticed that documentation for survival models is lacking and wondering if anyone can help me with or point me to resources that can help with my modeling challenges.
I am trying to build a survival model for phenological data (first species occurrence). There is one data point for each sampling site-year combination with accompanying climatic covariates that vary over time. One main challenge is that many of the data points are left-censored (with their own unique censoring time). I know the event has occurred, but only that it is less than or equal to the censoring point.
What I want to predict is the true event occurrence times. I believe I could get this through the hazard (and survival) function, but I would rather treat the censored event times as parameters and get a posterior distribution for the true event times.
Is this possible to implement in STAN or packages such as brms or rstanarm? I would ideally like to do it in STAN so I can add a hierarchical component on top of this later, but will do what works.
Thank you