Efficient estimation of the regression coefficients in longitudinal data analysis requires a correct specification of the covariance structure. If misspecification occurs, it may lead to inefficient or biased estimators of parameters in the mean. One of the most commonly used methods for...

Outliers are commonly observed in psychosocial research, generally resulting in biased estimates when comparing group differences using popular mean-based models such as the analysis of variance model. Rank-based methods such as the popular Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) rank sum test are more...

In this paper, multidimensional item response theory models for dichotomous data, developed in the fields of psychometrics and ability assessment, are discussed in connection with the problem of evaluating customer satisfaction. These models allow us to take into account latent constructs at...

In this paper, we formulate a very flexible family of models which unifies most recent lifetime distributions. The main idea is to obtain a cumulative distribution function to transform the baseline distribution with an activation mechanism characterized by a latent threshold variable. The new...

Bayesian networks are not well-formulated for continuous variables. The majority of recent works dealing with Bayesian inference are restricted only to special types of continuous variables such as the conditional linear Gaussian model for Gaussian variables. In this context, an exact Bayesian...

Joinpoint regression model identifies significant changes in the trends of the incidence, mortality, and survival of a specific disease in a given population. The purpose of the present study is to develop an age-stratified Bayesian joinpoint regression model to describe mortality trend assuming...

The problem of whether seasonal decomposition should be used prior to or after aggregation of time series is quite old. We tackle the problem by using a state-space representation and the variance/covariance structure of a simplified one-component model. The variances of the estimated components...

A generalized version of inverted exponential distribution (IED) is considered in this paper. This lifetime distribution is capable of modeling various shapes of failure rates, and hence various shapes of aging criteria. The model can be considered as another useful two-parameter generalization...