Estimates of HIV prevalence are important for policy in order to establish the health status of a country's population, to evaluate the effectiveness of population-based interventions and campaigns, to identify the most at risk members of the population, and to target those most in need of...

Recent work by Reiss and Ogden provides a theoretical basis for sometimes preferring restricted maximum likelihood (REML) to generalized cross-validation (GCV) for smoothing parameter selection in semiparametric regression. However, existing REML or marginal likelihood (ML) based methods for...

type="main" xml:id="rssc12068-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>We consider an application in electricity grid load prediction, where generalized additive models are appropriate, but where the data set's size can make their use practically intractable with existing methods. We therefore develop practical...</p>

The problem of testing smooth components of an extended generalized additive model for equality to zero is considered. Confidence intervals for such components exhibit good across-the-function coverage probabilities if based on the approximate result <inline-formula><inline-graphic xlink:href="ASS048IM1" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/></inline-formula>, where f is the vector of evaluated values...

Testing that random effects are zero is difficult, because the null hypothesis restricts the corresponding variance parameter to the edge of the feasible parameter space. In the context of generalized linear mixed models, this paper exploits the link between random effects and penalized...

The distributional assumption for a generalized linear model is often checked by plotting the ordered deviance residuals against the quantiles of a standard normal distribution. Such plots can be difficult to interpret, because even when the model is correct, the plot often deviates...

The problem of variable selection within the class of generalized additive models, when there are many covariates to choose from but the number of predictors is still somewhat smaller than the number of observations, is considered. Two very simple but effective shrinkage methods and an extension...