A new definition of depth for functional observations is introduced based on the notion of "half-region" determined by a curve. The half-region depth provides a simple and natural criterion to measure the centrality of a function within a sample of curves. It has computational advantages...

Generalized Procrustes analysis is a popular method for matching several configurations by translations, rotations/reflections and scaling constants. It aims at producing a group average from these Euclidean similarity transformations followed by bi-linear approximation of this group average for...

A mark variable is a generalization of measurements such as lifetime medical costs and quality-adjusted lifetimes. Recently, analysis of the mark variable has generated significant interest as an important component in health treatment evaluation. In this paper, a novel approach to estimating...

Variational methods for approximate Bayesian inference provide fast, flexible, deterministic alternatives to Monte Carlo methods. Unfortunately, unlike Monte Carlo methods, variational approximations cannot, in general, be made to be arbitrarily accurate. This paper develops grid-based...

A statistical methodology to handle aggregate data is proposed. Aggregate data arise in many fields such as medical science, ecology, social science, reliability, etc. They can be described as follows: individuals are moving progressively along a finite set of states and observations are made in...

Exact calculations of model posterior probabilities or related quantities are often infeasible due to the analytical intractability of predictive densities. Here new approximations for obtaining predictive densities are proposed and contrasted with those based on the Laplace method. Our theory...

The outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere are known as the ionosphere, a plasma of free electrons and positively charged atomic ions. The electron density of the ionosphere varies considerably with time of day, season, geographical location and the sun's activity. Maps of electron density are...

To study the equality of several normal means when the variances are unknown and unequal, we propose a fiducial based test, and theoretically examine the frequentist property of the proposed test. We numerically compare the performance of the proposed approach with several tests, recently...

Orthologs are genes in different species that have diverged from a common ancestral gene after speciation. In contrast, paralogs are genes that have diverged after a gene duplication event. For many comparative analyses, it is of interest to identify orthologs with similar functions. Such...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a Bayesian analysis for nonlinear regression models under scale mixtures of skew-normal distributions. This novel class of models provides a useful generalization of the symmetrical nonlinear regression models since the error distributions cover both...