Dose-response modeling of quantitative response data for risk assessment

The current regulation of non-carcinogenic effects has generally been based on dividing a safety factor into an experimental no-observed-effect-level (NOEL), giving a regulatory reference dose (RfD). This approach does not attempt to estimate the risk as a function of dose; it assumes no significant risk for the dose below the RfD. This paper proposes a mathematical model for finding the upper confidence limit on risk and lower confidence limit on dose for quantitative risk assessment when the responses follow a normal distribution. The proposed procedure appears to be conservative; this is supported by results of a simulation study. The procedure is illustrated by application to real data.     

Process Capability Assessment for Asymmetric Tolerances with Consideration of Gauge Measurement Errors

In recent years, the issue of process capability assessment in the presence of gauge measurement errors (GME) for cases with symmetric tolerances was investigated enthusiastically. However, even processes with symmetric tolerances are very common in practical situations, cases of asymmetric tolerances also occur in manufacturing industries. In this article, a novel approach, called the generalized confidence interval (GCI) approach, is applied to assess the capabilities of processes with asymmetric tolerances in the presence of the GME. To examine the performance of the proposed approach, an exhaustive simulation was conducted. The conclusion is that the proposed approach appears quite satisfactorily for assessing process performance with asymmetric tolerances in the presence of GME in terms of the coverage rate (CR) and the average value of the generalized lower confidence limits.     

A method of power assessment for tests comparing several treatments with a control

A method of power assessment for the problem of comparing several treatments with a control is considered. Power assessment is based on the power function of a two-sided hypothesis test that none of the treatment is different from the control. Normally distributed data and binary response data are considered. Minimum power levels are found under certain easily interpretable range conditions on the treatment and control means or success probabilities. Expressions are provided allowing simple computer evaluation of minimum guaranteed power levels, and some illustrative tables of power levels are given.     

Robust estimation for non-homogeneous data and the selection of the optimal tuning parameter: the density power divergence approach

The density power divergence (DPD) measure, defined in terms of a single parameter α, has proved to be a popular tool in the area of robust estimation [1 A. Basu, I.R. Harris, N.L. Hjort and M.C. Jones, Robust and efficient estimation by minimizing a density power divergence, Biometrika 85 (1998), pp. 549–559. doi: 10.1093/biomet/85.3.549[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]]. Recently, Ghosh and Basu [5 A. Ghosh and A. Basu, Robust estimation for independent non-homogeneous observations using density power divergence with applications to linear regression, Electron. J. Stat. 7 (2013), pp. 2420–2456. doi: 10.1214/13-EJS847[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] rigorously established the asymptotic properties of the MDPDEs in case of independent non-homogeneous observations. In this paper, we present an extensive numerical study to describe the performance of the method in the case of linear regression, the most common setup under the case of non-homogeneous data. In addition, we extend the existing methods for the selection of the optimal robustness tuning parameter from the case of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data to the case of non-homogeneous observations. Proper selection of the tuning parameter is critical to the appropriateness of the resulting analysis. The selection of the optimal robustness tuning parameter is explored in the context of the linear regression problem with an extensive numerical study involving real and simulated data.