Frailties models, an extension of the proportional hazards model, are used to model clustered survival data. In some situations there may be competing risks within a cluster. When this happens the basic frailty model is no longer appropriate. Depending on the purpose of the analysis, either the...

Longitudinal censoring is a common artifact when evaluating biomarkers and an obstacle to overcome when jointly investigating the longitudinal nature of the data and the impact on the survival prognoses of a study population. To fully appreciate the complexity of this scenario one has to devise...

The joint effect of several variables is a prevailing statistical concept in biology. The public health importance of developing methods to better assess joint effects is evident when studying gene combinations that function together to produce a disease phenotype, or biomarker pairs that...

Survival analysis has been used to estimate underlying survival or failure probabilities and to estimate the effects of covariates on survival times. The Cox proportional hazards regression model is the most commonly used approach. However, in practical situations, the assumption of proportional...

In population based genetic association studies, confounding due to population stratification (PS) arises when differences in both allele and disease frequencies exist in a population of mixed racial/ethnic subpopulations. Propensity scores are often used to address confounding in observational...

In this article, we describe a new software for modeling correlated binary data based on orthogonalized residuals (Zink and Qaqish, 2009), a recently developed estimating equations approach that includes, as a special case, alternating logistic regressions (Carey et al., 1993). The software is...

Deletion diagnostics are introduced for the regression analysis of clustered binary outcomes estimated with alternating logistic regressions, an implementation of generalized estimating equations (GEE) that estimates regression coefficients in a marginal mean model and in a model for the...

Statistical approaches used for gene mapping can be divided into two types: linkage and association analysis. This dissertation work addresses statistical methods in both areas.In the area of linkage analysis, I consider the problem of QTL (Quantitative Trait Locus) linkage analysis. Linkage...

Medication non-adherence impacts public health by impeding the evaluation of medication efficacy, decreasing improvement and/or increasing morbidity in patients, while increasing health care costs. As a result, intervention studies are designed to improve adherence rates. Medication adherence is...

In a longitudinal study of biomarker data collected during a hospital stay, observations may be missing due to administrative reasons, the death of the subject or the subject's discharge from the hospital, resulting in non-ignorable missing data. Standard likelihood-based methods for the...