Background: An important issue in prediction modeling of multivariate data is the measure of dependence structure. The use of Pearson's correlation as a dependence measure has several pitfalls and hence application of regression prediction models based on this correlation may not be an...

Background: In this paper we propose the use of the within-subject coefficient of variation as an index of a measurement's reliability. For continuous variables and based on its maximum likelihood estimation we derive a variance-stabilizing transformation and discuss confidence interval...

In many maintenance treatment trials, patients are first enrolled into an open treatmentbefore they are randomized into treatment groups. During this period, patients are followedover time with their responses measured longitudinally. This design is very common intoday's public health studies of...

The Generalized Additive model (GAM) has been used as a standard tool for epidemiologic analysis exploring the effect of air pollution on population health during the last decade as it allows nonparametric relationships between the independent predictors and response. One major concern to the...

One of the most popular uses for tree-based methods is in survival analysis for censored time data where the goal is to identify factors that are predictive of survival. Tree-based methods, due to their ability to identify subgroups in a hierarchical manner, can sometimes provide a useful...

This paper is concerned with nonparametric methods for comparing medians of paired data with unpaired values on both responses. A new nonparametric test statistic is proposed in this paper based on a Mann-Whitney U test making comparisons across complete and incomplete pairs. A method of finding...

Generalized additive model (GAM) with natural cubic splines (NS) has been commonly used as a standard analytical tool in time series studies of health effects of air pollution. Standard model selection procedures used in GAM ignore the uncertainty in model fitting. This may lead to biased...

Tree-structured survival analysis (TSSA) is used to recursively detect covariate values that best divide the sample into subsequent subsets with respect to a time to event outcome. The result is a set of empirical classification groups, each of which identifies individuals with more homogeneous...

Adaptive treatment regime is a set of rules that governs the assignment of time-varying treatment based on observed covariates and intermediate response. Treatment choices are made sequentially as patients make transition from one health state to another. Specifically, in two stage randomization...

In the analysis of time-to-event data, the median residual life (MERL) function has been promoted by many researchers as a practically relevant summary of the residual life distribution. Formally the MERL function at a time point is defined as the median of the remaining lifetimes among...