The evaluation of nursing homes and the assessment of the quality of the health care provided to their patients are usually based on the administration of questionnaires made of a large number of polytomous items. In applications involving data collected by questionnaires of this type, the...

In this paper we discuss the calibration issues of regime switching models built on mean-reverting and local volatility processes combined with two Markov regime switch- ing processes. In fact, the volatility structure of this model depends on a first exogenous Markov chain whereas the drift...

Multi-level nonlinear mixed effects (ML-NLME) models have received a great deal of attention in recent years because of the flexibility they offer in handling the repeated-measures data arising from various disciplines. In this study, we propose both maximum likelihood and restricted maximum...