The measurement and improvement of the quality of health care are important areas of current research and development. A judgement of appropriateness of medical outcomes in hospital quality-of-care studies must depend on an assessment of patient sickness at admission to hospital. Indicators of...

The efficiency of a marginal likelihood estimator where the product of the marginal posterior distributions is used as an importance sampling function is investigated. The approach is generally applicable to multi-block parameter vector settings, does not require additional Markov Chain Monte...

A conjugate and conditional conjugate Bayesian analysis is presented for bi-directed discrete graphical models, which are used to describe and estimate marginal associations between categorical variables. To achieve this, each bi-directed graph is re-expressed by a Markov equivalent, over the...

In this paper we present an R package called bivpois for maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of bivariate and diagonal inflated bivariate Poisson regression models. An Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is implemented. Inflated models allow for modelling both over-dispersion (or...

Bayesian analysis of correlated binary data when individual information is not available is considered. In particular, a binary outcome is measured on the same subjects of two independent groups at two separate occasions (usually time points). The groups are formulated through a binary exposure...

Mystery shopping is a well known marketing technique used by companies and marketing analysts to measure quality of service, and gather information about products and services. In this article, we analyse data from mystery shopping surveys via Bayesian networks in order to examine and evaluate...

This paper deals with the Bayesian analysis of graphical models of marginal independence for three way contingency tables. Each marginal independence model corresponds to a particular factorization of the cell probabilities and a conjugate analysis based on Dirichlet prior can be performed. We...

We propose a conjugate and conditional conjugate Bayesian analysis of models of marginal independence with a bi-directed graph representation. We work with Markov equivalent directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) obtained using the same vertex set with the addition of some latent vertices when required....