A patient’s medical problem list describes his or her current health status and aids in the coordination and transfer of care between providers. Because a problem list is generated once and then subsequently modified or updated, what is not usually observable is the provider-effect. That is, to what extent does a patient’s problem in the electronic medical record actually reflect a consensus communication

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) experience is known to be one of the most crucial factors that drive preterm infants’ neurodevelopmental and health outcome. It is hypothesized that stressful early life experience of very preterm neonate is imprinting gut microbiome by the regulation of the so-called brain-gut axis, and, consequently, certain microbiome markers are predictive of later infant

Actor–event data are common in sociological settings, whereby one registers the pattern of attendance of a group of social actors to a number of events. We focus on 79 members of the Noordin Top terrorist network, who were monitored attending 45 events. The attendance or nonattendance of the terrorist to events defines the social fabric, such as group coherence and social communities. The aim of the

This research proposes a comprehensive ALG model (Adaptive Log-linear zero-inflated Generalized Poisson integer-valued GARCH) to describe the dynamics of integer-valued time series of crime incidents with the features of autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity, overdispersion and excessive number of zero observations. The proposed ALG model captures time-varying nonlinear dependence and simultaneously

One of the major research questions regarding human microbiome studies is the feasibility of designing interventions that modulate the composition of the microbiome to promote health and to cure disease. This requires extensive understanding of the modulating factors of the microbiome, such as dietary intake, as well as the relation between microbial composition and phenotypic outcomes, such as body

When a latent shoeprint is discovered at a crime scene, forensic analysts inspect it for distinctive patterns of wear such as scratches and holes (known as accidentals) on the source shoe’s sole. If its accidentals correspond to those of a suspect’s shoe, the print can be used as forensic evidence to place the suspect at the crime scene. The strength of this evidence depends on the random match probability—the

Understanding the population-level effects of vaccines has important public health policy implications. Inferring vaccine effects from an observational study is challenging because participants are not randomized to vaccine (i.e., treatment). Observational studies of infectious diseases present the additional challenge that vaccinating one participant may affect another participant’s outcome, that

Missing attributes are ubiquitous in causal inference, as they are in most applied statistical work. In this paper we consider various sets of assumptions under which causal inference is possible despite missing attributes and discuss corresponding approaches to average treatment effect estimation, including generalized propensity score methods and multiple imputation. Across an extensive simulation

We study the distribution of brain source from the most advanced brain imaging technique, Magnetoencephalography (MEG) which measures the magnetic fields outside of the human head produced by the electrical activity inside the brain. Common time-varying source localization methods assume the source current with a time-varying structure and solve the MEG inverse problem by mainly estimating the source

Saudi Arabia has recently begun promoting renewable energy as a potential alternative to fossil fuels for domestic power generation. In order to efficiently connect wind energy to the existing power grids, reliable wind forecasts and an accurate way of quantifying the uncertainties of these forecasts are required. Motivated by a data set of hourly wind speeds from 28 stations in Saudi Arabia, we build

Numerical climate models are complex and combine a large number of physical processes. They are key tools in quantifying the relative contribution of potential anthropogenic causes (e.g., the current increase in greenhouse gases) on high-impact atmospheric variables like heavy rainfall. These so-called climate extreme event attribution problems are particularly challenging in a multivariate context

This paper develops tools to characterize how species are affected by environmental variability, based on a functional single index model relating a response such as growth rate to environmental conditions. In ecology the curvature of such responses are used, via Jensen’s inequality, to determine whether environmental variability is harmful or beneficial, and differing nonlinear responses to environmental

Community Question Answering (CQA) websites are widely used in sharing knowledge, where users can ask questions, reply answers and evaluate answers. So far, the evaluation of answers has been explained by the contents of answers through the investigation of users’ topics of interest and expertise levels. In this paper we focus on modeling the user’s evaluation behavior, in that users can see the answerer’s

Hate speech is ubiquitous on the Web. Recently, the offline causes that contribute to online hate speech have received increasing attention. A recurring question is whether the occurrence of extreme events offline systematically triggers bursts of hate speech online, indicated by peaks in the volume of hateful social media posts. Formally, this question translates into measuring the association between

Motivated by an example from remote sensing of gas emission sources, we derive two novel change-point procedures for multivariate time series where, in contrast to classical change-point literature, the changes are not required to be aligned in the different components of the time series. Instead, the change points are described by a functional relationship where the precise shape depends on unknown

Antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody associated vasculitis (AAV) is extremely heterogeneous in clinical presentation and involves multiple organ systems. While the clinical presentation of AAV is diverse, we hypothesized that all AAV share common pathways and tested the hypothesis based on three different microarray studies of peripheral leukocytes, sinus and orbital inflammation disease. For the hypothesis

In 2020, our understanding of the distributions of HIV risks in the most burdened settings, including eSwatini, remains limited. In part, this is driven by the limited availability of the size and burden of the populations at the greatest risk for HIV. Given pervasive social and healthcare stigmas, the size estimations of these populations often rely on the multiplier method—a variant of the capture-recapture

Amid historically low response rates, survey researchers seek ways to reduce respondent burden while measuring desired concepts with precision. We propose to ask fewer questions of respondents and impute missing responses via probabilistic matrix factorization. A variance-minimizing active learning criterion chooses the most informative questions per respondent. In simulations of our matrix sampling

Robotic hand prostheses require a controller to decode muscle contraction information, such as electromyogram (EMG) signals, into the user’s desired hand movement. State-of-the-art decoders demand extensive training, require data from a large number of EMG sensors and are prone to poor predictions. Biomechanical models of a single movement degree-of-freedom tell us that relatively few muscles, and

In the analysis of pooled data from multiple studies involving a biomarker exposure, the biomarker measurements can vary across laboratories and usually require calibration to a reference assay prior to pooling. Previous researches consider the measurements from a reference laboratory as the gold standard, even though measurements in the reference laboratory are not necessarily closer to the underlying

In this paper we model basketball plays as episodes from team-specific nonstationary Markov decision processes (MDPs) with shot clock dependent transition probabilities. Bayesian hierarchical models are employed in the modeling and parametrization of the transition probabilities to borrow strength across players and through time. To enable computational feasibility, we combine lineup-specific MDPs

Currently in the United States, lung transplantations are allocated to candidates according to each candidate’s lung allocation score (LAS). The LAS is an ad hoc ranking system for patients’ priorities of transplantation. The goal of this study is to develop a framework for improving patients’ life expectancies over the LAS based on a comprehensive modeling of the lung transplantation waiting list

Large-scale replication studies like the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) provide invaluable systematic data on scientific replicability, but most analyses and interpretations of the data fail to agree on the definition of “replicability” and disentangle the inexorable consequences of known selection bias from competing explanations. We discuss three concrete definitions of replicability

Data from electronic health records (EHR) are prone to errors which are often correlated across multiple variables. The error structure is further complicated when analysis variables are derived as functions of two or more error-prone variables. Such errors can substantially impact estimates, yet we are unaware of methods that simultaneously account for errors in covariates and time-to-event outcomes

The calculation of quality of care measures based on electronic medical records (EMRs) may be inaccurate because of incomplete capture of past services. We evaluate the influence of different statistical approaches for calculating the proportion of patients who are up-to-date for a preventive service, using the example of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. We propose an extension of traditional mixture

To analyze data from multisubject experiments in neuroimaging studies, we develop a modeling framework for joint community detection in a group of related networks that can be considered as a sample from a population of networks. The proposed random effects stochastic block model facilitates the study of group differences and subject-specific variations in the community structure. The model proposes

Movement of soil and rocks in an unstable slope under gravitational forces is an example of a complex system that is highly dynamic in space and time. A typical failure in such systems is a landslide. Fundamental studies of granular media failure combined with a complex network analysis of radar monitoring data show that distinct partitions emerge in the kinematic field in the early stages of the prefailure

Recurrent events are commonly encountered in longitudinal studies. The observation of recurrent events is often stopped by a dependent terminal event in practice. For this data scenario, we propose two sensible adaptations of the generalized accelerated recurrence time (GART) model (J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 111 (2016) 145–156) to provide useful alternative analyses that can offer physical interpretations

Warranty return data from repairable systems, such as home appliances, lawn mowers, computers and automobiles, result in recurrent event data. The nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) model is used widely to describe such data. Seasonality in the repair frequencies and other variabilities, however, complicate the modeling of recurrent event data. Not much work has been done to address the seasonality

We tackle modelling and inference for variable selection in regression problems with many predictors and many responses. We focus on detecting hotspots, that is, predictors associated with several responses. Such a task is critical in statistical genetics, as hotspot genetic variants shape the architecture of the genome by controlling the expression of many genes and may initiate decisive functional

A central point of disagreement, in certain long-standing discussions about a particular whaling dataset in the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission, has directly involved model selection issues for linear mixed effect models. The biological question under discussion is associated with a clearly defined parameter of primary interest, a focus parameter, which makes model selection

In the last two decades ambient levels of air pollution have declined substantially. At the same time the Clean Air Act mandates that the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) must be routinely assessed to protect populations based on the latest science. Therefore, researchers should continue to address the following question: is exposure to levels of air pollution below the NAAQS harmful

As in any observational study, in a case-control study a primary concern is potential unmeasured confounders. Bias, due to unmeasured confounders, can result in a false discovery of an apparent treatment effect when there is none. Replication of an observational study, which tries to provide multiple analyses of the data where the biases affecting each analysis are thought to be different, is one way

Efficient variable selection in high-dimensional cancer genomic studies is critical for discovering genes associated with specific cancer types and for predicting response to treatment. Censored survival data is prevalent in such studies. In this article we introduce a Bayesian variable selection procedure that uses a mixture prior composed of a point mass at zero and an inverse moment prior in conjunction

High-throughput metabolomics data are fraught with both nonignorable missing observations and unobserved factors that influence a metabolite’s measured concentration, and it is well known that ignoring either of these complications can compromise estimators. However, current methods to analyze these data can only account for the missing data or unobserved factors, but not both. We therefore developed

The development of systematic and structured approaches to assess benefit–risk of medical products is a major challenge for regulatory decision makers. Existing benefit–risk methods depend only on the frequencies of mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories in which the subjects fall, and the responses of individuals are allowed to belong to any of the other categories during their postwithdrawal

Multiview data, which represent distinct but related groupings of variables, can be useful for identifying relevant and robust clustering structures among observations. A large number of multiview classification algorithms have been proposed in the fields of computer science and genomics; here, we instead focus on the task of merging or splitting an existing hard or soft cluster partition based on

Statistical inference of evolutionary parameters from molecular sequence data relies on coalescent models to account for the shared genealogical ancestry of the samples. However, inferential algorithms do not scale to available data sets. A strategy to improve computational efficiency is to rely on simpler coalescent and mutation models, resulting in smaller hidden state spaces. An estimate of the

We consider the use of sample survey data to estimate dyadic characteristics of family networks, with an application to noncoresident parent–child dyads. We suppose that survey respondents report either from a parent or child perspective about a dyad, depending on their membership of the dyad. We construct separate estimators of common dyadic characteristics using data from both a parent and a child

Since the 1940s, population projections have in most cases been produced using the deterministic cohort component method. However, in 2015, for the first time and in a major advance, the United Nations issued official probabilistic population projections for all countries based on Bayesian hierarchical models for total fertility and life expectancy. The estimates of these models and the resulting projections

Technological advancements in the field of mobile devices and wearable sensors have helped overcome obstacles in the delivery of care, making it possible to deliver behavioral treatments anytime and anywhere. Here, we discuss our work on the design of a mobile health smoking cessation intervention study with the goal of assessing whether reminders, delivered at times of stress, result in a reduction/prevention

Angular measurements are often modeled as circular random variables, where there are natural circular analogues of moments, including correlation. Because a product of circles is a torus, a $d$-dimensional vector of circular random variables lies on a $d$-dimensional torus. For such vectors we present here a class of graphical models, which we call torus graphs, based on the full exponential family

We consider the scientifically challenging and policy-relevant task of understanding the past and projecting the future dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet. The Antarctic ice sheet has shown a highly nonlinear threshold response to past climate forcings. Triggering such a threshold response through anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would drive drastic and potentially fast sea level rise with important

We address the problem of estimating smoothly varying baseline trends in time series data. This problem arises in a wide range of fields, including chemistry, macroeconomics and medicine; however, our study is motivated by the analysis of data from low cost air quality sensors. Our methods extend the quantile trend filtering framework to enable the estimation of multiple quantile trends simultaneously

Case-control mother–offspring pair design has been widely adopted for studying early-life and women’s pregnancy health. It allows assessment of pre- and perinatal environmental risk factors as well as both maternal and offspring genetic risk factors. Data arising from this design is routinely analyzed using standard prospective logistic regression. Such data has two unique features: the offspring genotypes

Modern climate models pose an ever-increasing storage burden to computational facilities, and the upcoming generation of global simulations from the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will require a substantial share of the budget of research centers worldwide to be allocated just for this task. A statistical model can be used as a means to mitigate the storage burden by providing a stochastic

Mass spectrometry proteomics, characterized by spiky, spatially heterogeneous functional data, can be used to identify potential cancer biomarkers. Existing mass spectrometry analyses utilize mean regression to detect spectral regions that are differentially expressed across groups. However, given the interpatient heterogeneity that is a key hallmark of cancer, many biomarkers are only present at aberrant

Trang Quynh Nguyen, Elizabeth A. Stuart. Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 518--520.

Detecting associations between microbial compositions and sample characteristics is one of the most important tasks in microbiome studies. Most of the existing methods apply univariate models to single microbial species separately, with adjustments for multiple hypothesis testing. We propose a Bayesian analysis for a generalized mixed effects linear model tailored to this application. The marginal

Environmental changes in recent years have been linked to phenological shifts which in turn are linked to the survival of species. The work in this paper is motivated by capture-recapture data on blackcaps collected by the British Trust for Ornithology as part of the Constant Effort Sites monitoring scheme. Blackcaps overwinter abroad and migrate to the UK annually for breeding purposes. We propose

Neuroscientists often use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to infer effects of treatments on neural activity in brain regions. In a typical fMRI experiment, each subject is observed at several hundred time points. At each point, the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response is measured at 100,000 or more locations (voxels). Typically, these responses are modeled treating each voxel

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular method for dimension reduction in unsupervised multivariate analysis. However, existing ad hoc uses of PCA in both multivariate regression (multiple outcomes) and multiple regression (multiple predictors) lack theoretical justification. The differences in the statistical properties of PCAs in these two regression settings are not well understood. In this

Activity spaces are fundamental to the assessment of individuals’ dynamic exposure to social and environmental risk factors associated with multiple spatial contexts that are visited during activities of daily living. In this paper we survey existing approaches for measuring the geometry, size and structure of activity spaces, based on GPS data, and explain their limitations. We propose addressing

In actuarial research a task of particular interest and importance is to predict the loss cost for individual risks so that informative decisions are made in various insurance operations such as underwriting, ratemaking and capital management. The loss cost is typically viewed to follow a compound distribution where the summation of the severity variables is stopped by the frequency variable. A challenging

This paper focuses on spatial and temporal modeling of point processes on linear networks. Point processes on linear networks can simply be defined as point events occurring on or near line segment network structures embedded in a certain space. A separable modeling framework is introduced that posits separate formation and dissolution models of point processes on linear networks over time. While the

We introduce a fast, closed-form, simulation-free method to model and forecast multiple asset returns and employ it to investigate the optimal ensemble of features to include when jointly predicting monthly stock and bond excess returns. Our approach builds on the Bayesian dynamic linear models of West and Harrison (Bayesian Forecasting and Dynamic Models (1997) Springer), and it can objectively determine

Humans are routinely exposed to mixtures of chemical and other environmental factors, making the quantification of health effects associated with environmental mixtures a critical goal for establishing environmental policy sufficiently protective of human health. The quantification of the effects of exposure to an environmental mixture poses several statistical challenges. It is often the case that

The distribution of deaths by cause provides crucial information for public health planning, response and evaluation. About 60% of deaths globally are not registered or given a cause, limiting our ability to understand disease epidemiology. Verbal autopsy (VA) surveys are increasingly used in such settings to collect information on the signs, symptoms and medical history of people who have recently

Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data; however, large species interaction databases are typically sparse and covariates are limited to only a fraction of species. On the other hand, evolutionary relationships, encoded as phylogenetic trees, can act as proxies for underlying traits

Evolve and resequence studies provide a popular approach to simulate evolution in the lab and explore its genetic basis. In this context, Pearson’s chi-square test, Fisher’s exact test as well as the Cochran–Mantel–Haenszel test are commonly used to infer genomic positions affected by selection from temporal changes in allele frequency. However, the null model associated with these tests does not match