Non-specific responses to treatment (commonly known as placebo response) are pervasive when treating mental illness. Subjects treated with an active drug may respond in part due to non-specific aspects of the treatment, i.e, those not related to the chemical effect of the drug. To determine the...

This article presents a counterintuitive result regarding the estimation of a regression slope coefficient. Paradoxically, the precision of the slope estimator can deteriorate when additional information is used to estimate its value. In a randomized experiment, the distribution of baseline...

We examined the behavior of alternative smoothing methods for modeling environmental epidemiology data. Model fit can only be examined when the true exposure-response curve is known and so we used simulation studies to examine the performance of penalized splines (P-splines), restricted cubic...

Many statistical methods for continuous distributions assume a linear conditional expectation. Components of multivariate distributions are often measured on a discrete ordinal scale based on a discretization of an underlying continuous latent variable. The results in this paper show that common...

The slope is usually the parameter of primary importance in a simple linear regression. If the straight line model gives a poor fit to the data, one can consider the average slope of the non-linear response. In this paper, we show that if the response is quadratic, then the average slope can be...

The term 'principal points' originated in a problem of determining 'typical' heads for the design of protection masks, as described by Flury. Two principal points in the mask example correspond to a small and a large size. Principal points are cluster means for theoretical distributions, and...

Principal subspace theorems deal with the problem of finding subspaces supporting optimal approximations of multivariate distributions. The optimality criterion considered in this paper is the minimization of the mean squared distance between the given distribution and an approximating...