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Childhood obesity and the investigation of its risk factors has become an important public health issue. Our work is based on and motivated by a German longitudinal study including 2,226 children with up to ten measurements on their body mass index (BMI) and risk factors from birth to the age of 10 years. We introduce boosting of structured additive quantile regression as a novel distribution-free approach for longitudinal quantile regression. The quantile-specific predictors of our model include conventional linear population effects, smooth nonlinear functional effects, varying-coefficient terms, and individual-specific effects, such as intercepts and slopes. Estimation is based on boosting, a computer intensive inference method for highly complex models. We propose a component-wise functional gradient descent boosting algorithm that allows for penalized estimation of the large variety of different effects, particularly leading to individual-specific effects shrunken toward zero. This concept allows us to flexibly estimate the nonlinear age curves of upper quantiles of the BMI distribution, both on population and on individual-specific level, adjusted for further risk factors and to detect age-varying effects of categorical risk factors. Our model approach can be regarded as the quantile regression analog of Gaussian additive mixed models (or structured additive mean regression models), and we compare both model classes with respect to our obesity data.

Cohen’s kappa coefficient, which was introduced in 1960, serves as the most widely employed coefficient to assess inter-observer agreement for categorical outcomes. However, the original kappa can only be applied to cross-sectional binary measurements and, therefore, cannot be applied in the practical situation when the observers evaluate the same subjects at repeated time intervals. This study summarizes six methods of assessing agreement of repeated binary outcomes under different assumptions and discusses under which condition we should use the most appropriate method in practice. These approaches are illustrated using data from the CDC anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA) human clinical trial comparing the agreement for two solicited adverse events after AVA between the 1–3 day in-clinic medical record and the patient’s diary on the same day. We hope this article can inspire researchers to choose the most appropriate method to assess agreement for their own study with longitudinal binary data.

Species abundance distribution (SAD) is one of the important measures of biodiversity and one of the most significant concepts in ecology communities. Using this concept, the biologists can infer a lot of information from their collected data. In this article, we proposed a new method for predicting SAD. This method is based on the combination of several measures parameterized by machine learning techniques and decomposition of the model in sub-ranges having their proper combination. The goal is to use the combination of several individual models to design a better and more informative model. We show in this article by using many datasets representing different ecological situations that our new method is more robust and outperforms the predictive capacity of the other existing models.

This article addresses the problem of multiple contrast tests for repeated measures. Three procedures are described and compared by simulations concerning the familywise error type I. The procedure based on sandwich estimators seems to be most robust, except for all-pair comparisons.

Multiple contrast tests can be used to test arbitrary linear hypotheses by providing local and global test decisions as well as simultaneous confidence intervals. The ANOVA- F -test on the contrary can be used to test the global null hypothesis of no treatment effect. Thus, multiple contrast tests provide more information than the analysis of variance (ANOVA) by offering which levels cause the significance. We compare the exact powers of the ANOVA- F -test and multiple contrast tests to reject the global null hypothesis. Hereby, we compute their least favorable configurations (LFCs). It turns out that both procedures have the same LFCs under certain conditions. Exact power investigations show that their powers are equal to detect their LFCs.

Individual-level models (ILMs) have previously been used to model the spatiotemporal spread of infectious diseases. These models can incorporate individual-level covariate information, to account for population heterogeneity. However, incomplete or unreliable data are a common problem in infectious disease modeling, and models that are explicitly dependent on such information may not be robust to these inherent uncertainties. In this investigation, we assess an adaptation to a spatial ILM that incorporates a latent grouping structure based on some trait heterogeneous in the population. The resulting latent conditional ILM is then only dependent upon a discrete latent grouping variable, rather than precise covariate information. The posterior predictive ability of this proposed model is tested through a simulation study, in which the model is fitted to epidemic data simulated from a true model that utilizes explicit covariate information. In addition, the posterior predictive ability of the proposed ILM is also compared to that of an ILM that assumes population homogeneity. The application of these models to data from the 2001 UK foot-and-mouth disease epidemic is also explored. This study demonstrates that the use of a discrete latent grouping variable can be an effective alternative to utilizing covariate information, particularly when such information may be unreliable.

In many disease settings, it is likely that only a subset of the disease population will exhibit certain genetic or phenotypic differences from the healthy population. Therefore, when seeking to identify genes or other explanatory factors that might be related to the disease state, we might expect a mixture distribution of the variable of interest in the disease group. A number of methods have been proposed for performing tests to identify situations for which only a subgroup of samples or patients exhibit differential expression levels. Our discussion here focuses on how inattention to standard statistical theory can lead to approaches that exhibit some serious drawbacks. We present and discuss several approaches motivated by theoretical derivations and compare to an ad hoc approach based upon identification of outliers. We find that the outlier-sum statistic proposed by Tibshirani and Hastie offers little benefit over a t -test even in the most idealized scenarios and suffers from a number of limitations including difficulty of calibration, lack of robustness to underlying distributions, high false positive rates owing to its asymmetric treatment of groups, and poor power or discriminatory ability under many alternatives.

This article extends single-level missing data methods to efficient estimation of a Q -level nested hierarchical general linear model given ignorable missing data with a general missing pattern at any of the Q levels. The key idea is to reexpress a desired hierarchical model as the joint distribution of all variables including the outcome that are subject to missingness, conditional on all of the covariates that are completely observed and to estimate the joint model under normal theory. The unconstrained joint model, however, identifies extraneous parameters that are not of interest in subsequent analysis of the hierarchical model and that rapidly multiply as the number of levels, the number of variables subject to missingness, and the number of random coefficients grow. Therefore, the joint model may be extremely high dimensional and difficult to estimate well unless constraints are imposed to avoid the proliferation of extraneous covariance components at each level. Furthermore, the over-identified hierarchical model may produce considerably biased inferences. The challenge is to represent the constraints within the framework of the Q -level model in a way that is uniform without regard to Q ; in a way that facilitates efficient computation for any number of Q levels; and also in a way that produces unbiased and efficient analysis of the hierarchical model. Our approach yields Q -step recursive estimation and imputation procedures whose q th-step computation involves only level- q data given higher-level computation components. We illustrate the approach with a study of the growth in body mass index analyzing a national sample of elementary school children.

We compare the frequency of resistant genes of malaria parasites before treatment and at first malaria incidence after treatment. The data come from a clinical trial at two health facilities in Tanzania and concerns single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at three positions believed to be related to resistance to malaria treatment. A problem is that mixed infections are common, which both obscures the underlying frequency of alleles at each locus as well as the associations between loci in samples where alleles are mixed. We use combinatorics and quite involved probability methods to handle multiple infections and multiple haplotypes. The infection with the different haplotypes seemed to be independent of each other. We showed that at two of the three studied SNPs, the proportion of resistant genes had increased after treatment with sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine alone but when treated in combination with artesunate, no effect was noticed. First recurrences of malaria associated more with sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine alone as treatment than when in combination with artesunate. We also found that the recruited children had two different ongoing malaria infections where the parasites had different gene types.