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...

Department: Biostatistics.

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...