Special issue about competing risks and multi-state models

There is a clear growing interest,at least in the statistical literature,in competing risks and multi-state models. with the rising interest in competing risks and multi-state models a number of software packages have been developed for the analysis of such models. the present special issue of the journal of statistical software introduces a selection of r packages devoted to competing risks and multi-state models. this introduction to the special issue contains some background and highlights the contents of the contributions.