type="main" xml:id="rssa12041-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Motivated by the problem of cancer risk assessment near a nuclear power generating station, the paper describes a methodology for fitting a spatially correlated survival model to large retrospective cohort data sets. Retrospective cohorts, which...</p>

This note uses the established connection between the local-EM and EMS algorithms to explore methods for smoothing mismeasured data. Implementations of local-EM are developed for several forms of censored and/or mismeasured data and their connections with other methods explored.

We investigate the effect of climate change on population growth in 18th and 19th century Iceland. We find that annual temperature changes help determine the population growth rate in pre-industrial Iceland: a year 1 degree Celsius cooler than average drives down population growth rates by...

Suppose a sequence of random variables {Xn} has negative drift when above a certain threshold and has increments bounded in Lp. When p2 this implies that EXn is bounded above by a constant independent of n and the particular 0sequence {Xn}. When p[less-than-or-equals, slant]2 there are...

We consider a system of particles moving independently on a countable state space, according to a general (non-space-homogeneous) Markov process. Under mild conditions, the number of particles at each site will converge to a product of independent Poisson distributions; this corresponds to...

We study a collective decision-making process in which people interested in an issue may participate, at a cost, in a meeting, and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants' preferences. We show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are...

We generalize and simplify a result of Schervish and Carlin (1992) concerning the convergence of Markov chains to their stationary distributions. We prove geometric convergence for any Markov chain whose transition operator is compact and has everywhere-positive density functions (with respect...

We consider the extent to which Markov chain convergence properties are affected by the presence of computer floating-point roundoff error. Both geometric ergodicity and polynomial ergodicity are considered. This paper extends previous work of Roberts et al. (J. Appl. Probab. 35 (1998) 1) to the...