In standard parametric classifiers, or classifiers based on nonparametric methods but where there is an opportunity for estimating population densities, the prior probabilities of the respective populations play a key role. However, those probabilities are largely ignored in the construction of...

In this paper we propose simple, general tiered classifiers for relatively complex data. Empirical studies on real and simulated data show that three two-tier classifiers, which are respective extensions of linear discriminant analysis, linear logistic regression and support vector machines, can...

Highlights, trends and influences are identified associated with the pages of Biometrika subsequent to the editorship of Karl Pearson. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Distance-based classifiers are generally considered to be effective at discriminating between populations that differ in location. Indeed, nearest-neighbour methods and the support vector machine are frequently used in very high-dimensional problems involving gene expression data, where it is...

If Fourier series are used as the basis for inference in deconvolution problems, the effects of the errors factorise out in a way that is easily exploited empirically. This property is the consequence of elementary addition formulae for sine and cosine functions, and is not readily available...

We suggest a completely empirical approach to the construction of confidence bands for hazard functions, based on smoothing the Nelsen-Aalen estimator. In particular, we introduce a local bandwidth-choice method. Our approach uses empirical information about both the survival rate and the...

We suggest a nonparametric approach to making inference about the structure of distributions in a potentially infinite-dimensional space, for example a function space, and displaying information about that structure. It is suggested that the simplest way of presenting the structure is through...

The objective of this paper is to estimate a bivariate density nonparametrically from a dataset from the joint distribution and datasets from one or both marginal distributions. We develop a copula-based solution, which has potential benefits even when the marginal datasets are empty. For...

Penalised spline regression is a popular new approach to smoothing, but its theoretical properties are not yet well understood. In this paper, mean squared error expressions and consistency results are derived by using a white-noise model representation for the estimator. The effect of the...