The phrase "a preceding time" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a time that occurred before a specific event or moment being discussed.
Example: "In a preceding time, the community thrived on agriculture before the industrial revolution changed their way of life."
Alternatives: "an earlier time" or "a prior time".
Deaths in a preceding time segment (e.g., stillbirths) were viewed as competing risks (non-independent) in analyses of death involving succeeding time segments e.g., neonatal death [ 21].
If there was also no available value from a preceding time interval, the laboratory value was assumed to be normal, similar to prior studies [ 32].
For primary outcome measurements monitored repeatedly, we used the final follow-up time point to calculate the missing rate, unless a preceding time point was specified.
However, the planet has become chemically 'different' in the past century from the condition at any preceding time, with a chemical space that includes many compounds hazardous to animal health and life.
It is shown that such truncations are, indeed, possible but a straightforward omission of preceding time values can introduce unacceptable errors in the calculated responses.
From this point, we did a retrospective research in the preceding time period to determine their last cytological examination.
The preceding time ℓ was assigned an Exponential prior distribution with mean 60dayss.
Rising searches, as defined by Google, are "searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period".
cFVC: forced volume capacity, defined as an average of two values in the year preceding time of pneumococcus isolation.
dFEV1: forced expiratory volume, defined as an average of two values in the year preceding time of pneumococcus isolation.
If a laboratory value was missing, the value from the preceding time interval was used, if available.
