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...