We adopt a hidden state approach for the analysis of longitudinal data subject to dropout. Motivated by two applied studies, we assume that subjects can move between three states: stable, crisis, dropout. Dropout is observed but the other two states are not. During a possibly transient crisis...

Several Monte Carlo methods have been proposed for computing marginal likelihoods in Bayesian analyses. Some of these involve sampling from a sequence of intermediate distributions between the prior and posterior. A difficulty arises if the support in the posterior distribution is a proper...