The main objective of this PhD was to further develop Bayesian spatio-temporal models (specifically the Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) class of models), for the analysis of sparse disease outcomes such as birth defects. The motivation for the thesis arose from problems encountered when...

In this paper, we present the FC direct trust value-based decision making methodology, for making direct trust value based decisions regarding interactions in (a) a given context and during the current time slot, and (b) a given context and at a future time slot. The direct trust value-based...

This paper demonstrates the utility of systems and control theory in the analysis of economic systems. Two applications demonstrate how the analysis of simple dynamic models sheds light on important practical problems. The first problem considers the design of a retail laboratory, where the...

Dynamic models, also termed state space models, comprise an extremely rich model class for time series analysis. This dissertation focuses on building state space models for a variety of contexts and computationally efficient methods for Bayesian inference for simultaneous estimation of latent...

This paper develops an error components model that is used to examine the impact of job changes on the dynamics and variance of individual log earnings. I use data on work histories drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), that makes possible to do the distinction between voluntary...

The point source is the most common type of source to be modeled for its effect on air pollution. Point sources provide auxiliary information that may impact both the mean and covariance structure of measured responses, but these possible impacts are often overlooked by spatial modelers. In this...

In survival data analysis, the proportional hazards (PH), accelerated failure time(AFT), and proportional odds (PO) models are commonly used semiparametric models forthe comparison of survivability in subjects. These models assume that the survival curvesdo not cross. However, in some clinical...

This dissertation quantitatively evaluates selected labor market policies in a search-matching model with skill heterogeneity where high-skilled workers can take temporary jobs with skill requirements below their skill levels. The joint posterior distribution of structural parameters of the...

Advances in capture–recapture methodology have allowed the inclusion of continuous, time-dependent individual-covariates as predictors of survival and capture probabilities. The problem posed by these covariates is that they are only observed for an individual when that individual is captured....

The present dissertation consists of three stand-alone research papers that all deal with factor models from a Bayesian perspective, both in a theoretical and an empirical setup. More precisely, the thesis is organized in a progressive way as follows: Chapter 1 briefly presents the general...