Likelihood-based inference for epidemic models can be challenging, in part due to difficulties in evaluating the likelihood. The problem is particularly acute in models of large-scale outbreaks, and unobserved or partially observed data further complicates this process. Here we investigate the...

Several measures have been proposed to summarize the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, including the Projected Length of the Curve (PLC) and the Area Swept out by the Curve (ASC). These indices were first proposed by Lee (Epidemiology 1996; 7:605-611) to avoid certain deficiencies of...

To select items from a uni-dimensional scale to create a reduced scale for disease screening, Liu and Jin (2007) developed a non-parametric method based on binary risk classification. When the measure for the risk of a disease is ordinal or quantitative, and possibly subject to random censoring,...

We examined the behavior of alternative smoothing methods for modeling environmental epidemiology data. Model fit can only be examined when the true exposure-response curve is known and so we used simulation studies to examine the performance of penalized splines (P-splines), restricted cubic...

The two one-sided tests procedure is used to test the equivalence of two measurements taken under different conditions. For example, two formulations of a drug are said to be bioequivalent if the average blood levels of the drug over time (AUC) are similar for the two formulations. In some...

We present a framework for meta-analysis of follow-up studies with constant or varying duration using the binary nature of the data directly. We use a generalized linear mixed model framework with the Poisson likelihood and the log link function. We fit models with fixed and random study effects...

Non-specific responses to treatment (commonly known as placebo response) are pervasive when treating mental illness. Subjects treated with an active drug may respond in part due to non-specific aspects of the treatment, i.e, those not related to the chemical effect of the drug. To determine the...

Dynamic allocation of participants to treatments in a clinical trial has been an alternative to randomization for nearly 35 years. Design-adaptive allocation is a particularly flexible kind of dynamic allocation. Every investigation of dynamic allocation methods has shown that they improve...

The predictive capacity of a marker in a population can be described using the population distribution of risk (Huang et al. 2007; Pepe et al. 2008a; Stern 2008). Virtually all standard statistical summaries of predictability and discrimination can be derived from it (Gail and Pfeiffer 2005). The goal of...

We propose a regression method for the estimation of conditional quantiles of a continuous response variable given a set of covariates when the data are dependent. Along with fixed regression coefficients, we introduce random coefficients which we assume to follow a form of multivariate Laplace...