Intervention policies, like stay-at-home orders, are shown to be effective in controlling the spread of the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, concerns over economic burdens of these policies have propelled U.S. states to move towards reopening. Decision-making in most states...

Direct out-of-pocket payments for healthcare continue to be a major source of health financing in low-income and middle-income countries. Some of these direct payments take the form of informal charges paid by patients to access the needed healthcare services. Remarkably, however, little is...

Statistical models involving latent variables are widely used in many areas of applications, such as biomedical science and social science. When likelihood-based parametric inferential methods are used to make statistical inference, certain distributional assumptions on the latent variables are...

County-based group crop insurance is not effective to growers in counties with heterogenous production practice. A model-based cluster and classification method is developed to facilitate the information needed in the study of sub-county-zone-based crop insurance. Wheat yield data from Whitman,...