This article considers the estimation of insurers' cost-efficiency in a longitudinal context. The current practice ignores the tails of the cost distribution, where the most and least efficient insurers belong to. To address this issue, we propose a copula regression model to estimate insurers'...

Health technology assessment often requires the evaluation of interventions which are implemented at the level of the health service organization unit (e.g. GP practice) for clusters of individuals. In a cluster randomized controlled trial (cRCT), clusters of patients are randomized; not each...

This study examines extensions of McNemar's Test with multinomial responses, and proposes a linear weighting scheme, based on the distance of the response change, that is applied to one of these extensions (Bowker's test). This weighted version of Bowker's test is then appropriate for ordinal...

In situations where the structure of one of the variables of a contingency table is ordered recent theory involving the augmentation of singular vectors and orthogonal polynomials has shown to be applicable for performing symmetric and non-symmetric correspondence analysis. Such an approach has...

A review of several statistical methods that are currently in use for outlier identification is presented, and their performances are compared theoretically for typical statistical distributions of experimental data, considering values derived from the distribution of extreme order statistics as...

The process through which food or beverages is verified as complying with its label description is called food authentication. We propose to treat the authentication process as a classification problem. We consider multivariate observations and propose a multivariate Bayesian classifier that...

The k nearest neighbors (k-NN) classifier is one of the most popular methods for statistical pattern recognition and machine learning. In practice, the size k, the number of neighbors used for classification, is usually arbitrarily set to one or some other small numbers, or based on the...

It is usually considered that the proportion of handicapped people grows with age. Namely, the older the man/woman, the more the level of disability he/she suffers. However, empirical evidence shows that this assessment is not always true, or at least, it is not true in the Spanish population....

Current methods of testing the equality of conditional correlations of bivariate data on a third variable of interest (covariate) are limited due to discretizing of the covariate when it is continuous. In this study, we propose a linear model approach for estimation and hypothesis testing of the...

Doubly truncated data appear in a number of applications, including astronomy and survival analysis. For doubly-truncated data, the lifetime T is observable only when U≤T≤V, where U and V are the left-truncated and right-truncated time, respectively. Based on the empirical likelihood...