MULTI-LEVEL FACTORIAL DESIGNS WITH MINIMUM NUMBERS OF LEVEL CHANGES

The order of experimental runs in a fractional factorial experiment is essential when the cost of level changes in factors is considered. The generalized foldover scheme given by [1] Coster, D. C. and Cheng, C. S. 1988. Minimum cost trend free run orders of fractional factorial designs. The Annals of Statistics, 16: 1188–1205. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]gives an optimal order to experimental runs in an experiment with specified defining contrasts. An experiment can be specified by a design requirement such as resolution or estimation of some interactions. To meet such a requirement, we can find several sets of defining contrasts. Applying the generalized foldover scheme to these sets of defining contrasts, we obtain designs with different numbers of level changes and then the design with minimum number of level changes. The difficulty is to find all the sets of defining contrasts. An alternative approach is investigated by [2] Cheng, C. S., Martin, R. J. and Tang, B. 1998. Two-level factorial designs with extreme numbers of level changes. The Annals of Statistics, 26: 1522–1539. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]for two-level fractional factorial experiments. In this paper, we investigate experiments with all factors in slevels.     

RANDOM PERMUTATION TESTING IN MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION

We developed an alternative random permutation testing method for multiple linear regression, which is an improvement over the existing one proposed by [1] Kennedy, P. E. 1995. Randomization tests in econometrics. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 13: 85–94. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] or [2] Freedman, D. and Lane, D. 1983. A nonstochastic interpretation of reported significance levels. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 1: 292–298. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar].     

RAO'S STATISTIC FOR THE ANALYSIS OF UNIFORM ASSOCIATION IN CROSS-CLASSIFICATIONS

In this paper we introduce a new measure for the analysis of association in cross-classifications having ordered categories. Association is measured in terms of the odd-ratios in 2 × 2 subtables formed from adjacent rows and adjacent columns. We focus our attention in the uniform association model. Our measure is based in the family of divergences introduced by Burbea and Rao [1] Burbea, J. and Rao, C. R. 1982a. On the convexity of some divergence measures based on entropy functions. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28: 489–495. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Some well-known sets of data are reanalyzed and a simulation study is presented to analyze the behavior of the new families of test statistics introduced in this paper.     

EVALUATION OF POWER OF TESTS INVOLVING COVARIATES UNDER NONCONSTANT VARIANCE

In many experiments where pre-treatment and post-treatment measurements are taken, investigators wish to determine if there is a difference between two treatment groups. For this type of data, the post-treatment variable is used as the primary comparison variable and the pre-treatment variable is used as a covariate. Although most of the discussion in this paper is written with the pre-treatment variable as the covariate the results are applicable to other choices of a covariate. Tests based on residuals have been proposed as alternatives to the usual covariance methods. Our objective is to investigate how the powers of these tests are affected when the conditional variance of the post-treatment variable depends on the magnitude of the pre-treatment variable. In particular, we investigate two cases. [1] Crager, Michael R. 1987. Analysis of Covariance in Parallel-Group Clinical Trials With Pretreatment Baselines. Biometrics, 43: 895–901. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] The conditional variance of the post-treatment variable gradually increases as the magnitude of the pre-treatment variable increases. (In many biological models this is the case.) [2] Knoke, James D. 1991. Nonparametric Analysis of Covariance for Comparing Change in Randomized Studies with Baseline Values Subject to Error. Biometrics, 47: 523–533. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] The conditional variance of the post-treatment variable is dependent upon natural or imposed subgroups contained within the pre-treatment variable. Power comparisons are made using Monte Carlo techniques.     

A NOTE ON ‘A COMPARISON OF BAYES AND MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION OF THE INTRACLASS CORRELATION COEFFICIENT’

Palmer and Broemeling [1] Palmer, J. L. and Broemeling, L. D. 1990. A Comparison of Bayes and Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient. Comm. Statist.-Theory Meth, 19: 953–975. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] compare Bayes and maximum likelihood estimates of the intraclass correlation (ICC). The prior information in their derivation of the Bayes estimator is placed on the variance components instead of the ICC itself. This paper finds a Bayes estimator of the ICC with the prior placed on the ICC. Bayes estimates based on three different priors are then compared to method of moments estimate.     

REGRESSION DIAGNOSTIC USING LOCAL INFLUENCE: A REVIEW

The local influence approach of Cook [1] Cook, R. D. 1986. Assessment of Local Influence. Journal Of The Royal Statistical Society Series B-Methodological, 48: 133–169.  [Google Scholar]to regression diagnostic is developed and discussed, and compared with Cook's [2] Cook, R. D. 1977. Detection of Influential Observations in Linear Regression. Technometrics, 19: 15–18. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]deletion approach. The ability of the local influence approach to handle cases simultaneously, as well as some of its theoretical and practical difficulties, are reviewed. The perturbation ideas of the approach are applied to the linear model making distinction between the local perturbations on the assumptions of the model and the data.     

BEADS,BAGS, BAYES,AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF SAMPLING THEORY

Motivated by a discussion of an elementary probability puzzle provided by Anderson and Provost [1] Anderson, O. D. and Provost, S. B. 1992. Beads, bags and Bayes. Int. J. Math. Educ. Sci. Technol., 23: 25–37. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], we review what may be called the fundamental problem of finite population sampling theory and propose that only super-model or Bayesian approaches to finite population sampling are acceptable.     

THE SEQUENTIAL BOOTSTRAP: A COMPARISON WITH REGULAR BOOTSTRAP

Based on Bradley Efron's observation that individual resamples in the regular bootstrap have support on approximately 63% of the original observations, C. R. Rao, P. K. Pathak and V. I. Koltchinskii [1] Rao, C. R., Pathak, P. K. and Koltchinskii, V. I. 1997. Bootstrap by Sequential Resampling. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 64: 257–281. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]have proposed a sequential resampling scheme. This sequential bootstrap stabilizes the information content of each resample by fixing the number of unique observations and letting N, the number of observatons in each resample, vary. The Rao-Pathak-Koltchinskii paper establishes the asymptotic correctness (consistency) of the sequential bootstrap. The main object of our investigation is to study the empirical properties of the Rao-Pathak-Koltchinskii sequential bootstrap as compared to the regular bootstrap. In all our settings, sequential bootstrap performs as well or better than regular bootstrap. In the particular case where we estimate standard errors of sample medians, we find that sequential bootstrap outperforms regular bootstrap by reducing variability in the final bootstrap estimates.     

COMBINING THE LIU ESTIMATOR AND THE PRINCIPAL COMPONENT REGRESSION ESTIMATOR

In this paper we introduce a class of estimators which includes the ordinary least squares (OLS), the principal components regression (PCR) and the Liu estimator [1] Liu, K. 1993. A new class of biased estimate in linear regression. Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods, 22(2): 393–402. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. In particular, we show that our new estimator is superior, in the scalar mean-squared error (mse) sense, to the Liu estimator, to the OLS estimator and to the PCR estimator.     

POOLED SLICING METHODS VERSUS SLICING METHODS

We consider the semiparametric regression model introduced by [1] Duan, N. and Li, K. C. 1991. Slicing regression: a link-free regression method. The Annals of Statistics, 19: 505–530. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. The dependent variable y is linked to the index x′ β through an unknown link function. [1] Duan, N. and Li, K. C. 1991. Slicing regression: a link-free regression method. The Annals of Statistics, 19: 505–530. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] and [2] Li, K. C. 1991. Sliced inverse regression for dimension reduction, with discussions. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 86: 316–342. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] present Slicing methods (the Sliced Inverse Regression methods SIR-I, SIR-II and SIR_α) in order to estimate the direction of the unknown slope parameter β. These methods are computationally simple and fast but depend on the choice of an arbitrary slicing fixed by the user. When the sample size is small, the number and the position of slices have an influence on the estimated direction. In this paper, we suggest to use the corresponding Pooled Slicing methods: PSIR-I (proposed by [3] Aragon, Y. and Saracco, J. 1997. Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR): an appraisal of small sample alternatives to slicing. Computational Statistics, 12: 109–130. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), PSIR-II and PSIR_α. These methods combine the results from a number of slicings. We compare the sample behaviour of Slicing and Pooled Slicing methods on simulations. We also propose a practical choice of α in SIR_α and PSIR_α methods.     

Choosing Ridge Parameter for Regression Problems

ABSTRACT

Hoerl and Kennard (1970a Hoerl , A. E. , Kennard , R. W. ( 1970a ). Ridge regression: biased estimation for non-orthogonal problems . Tech. 12 : 55 – 67 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) introduced the ridge regression estimator as an alternative to the ordinary least squares estimator in the presence of multicollinearity. In this article, a new approach for choosing the ridge parameter (K), when multicollinearity among the columns of the design matrix exists, is suggested and evaluated by simulation techniques, in terms of mean squared errors (MSE). A number of factors that may affect the properties of these methods have been varied. The MSE from this approach has shown to be smaller than using Hoerl and Kennard (1970a Hoerl , A. E. , Kennard , R. W. ( 1970a ). Ridge regression: biased estimation for non-orthogonal problems . Tech. 12 : 55 – 67 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in almost all situations.     

Bootstrap test of hypothesis for the multi-state models in survival analysis

Abstract

In the present paper we develop bootstrap tests of hypothesis, based on simulation, for the transition probability matrix arising in the context of a multi-state model. The bootstrap test statistic is based on the paper of Tattar and Vaman (2008 Tattar, P. N., Vaman, H. J. (2008). Testing transition probability matrix of a multi-state model with censored data. Lifetime Data Anal. 14(2):216–230.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), which develops a statistic for the testing problems concerning the transition probability matrix of the non homogeneous Markov process.     

ON CLASSIFICATION OF A BIVARIATE BINARY OBSERVATION

Classification of a bivariate binary observation into one of the two possible groups requires the estimation of the joint cell probabilities under each of the two groups. Two widely used approaches for the estimation of such joint cell probabilities are: [1] Seber, G. A. F. 1984. Multivariate Observations New York: John Wiley and Sons. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] kernel based non-parametric approach; and [2] McLachlan, G. J. 1992. Discriminant Analysis and Statistical Pattern Recognition New York: John Wiley and Sons. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] multinomial distribution based cell counts approach. In these traditional approaches, the joint cell probabilities are estimated without making any assumptions about the structural forms for these probabilities. Consequently, it is not clear, how these traditional approaches take into account the correlation that may exist between the 2-dimensional binary observations. In this paper, we model the cell probabilities by a suitable bivariate binary distribution which accommodates the correlation in a natural way, and examine the effect of this type of modelling in classifying a new correlated binary observation into one of the two groups. This is done by comparing the probability of misclassification yielded by the proposed model based approach with those of the kernel as well as multinomial distribution based approaches. It is shown through a simulation study that the probabilities of misclassification for the model based approach are substantially smaller than those of the other two approaches. We illustrate the use of the proposed model based approach in classification by analyzing a combined data from two epidemiological surveys of 6–11 year old children conducted in Connecticut, the New Haven Child Survey (NHCS) and the Eastern Connecticut Child Survey (ECCS).     

On asymptotics of multivariate integrals with applications to records

Let { X _n ,n≥1} be a sequence of iid. Gaussian random vectors in R ^d , d≥2, with nonsingular distribution function F. In this paper the asymptotics for the sequence of integrals I _F,n (G _n )?n∫ _{R ^d} G _n ^n?1( X ) dF( X ) is considered with G _n some distribution function on R ^d . In the case G _n =F the integral I _F,n (F)/n is the probability that a record occurs in X ₁,…, X _n at index n. [1] Gnedin, A.V. 1998. Records from a Multivariate Normal Sample. Statist. Probab. Lett., 39: 11–15. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] obtained lower and upper asymptotic bounds for this case, whereas [2] Ledford, W.A. and Twan, A.J. 1998. On the Tail Concomitant Behaviour for Extremes. Adv. Appl. Probab., 30: 197–215. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] showed the rate of convergence if d=2. In this paper we derive the exact rate of convergence of I _F,n (G _n ) for d≥2 under some restrictions on the distribution function G _n . Some related results for multivariate Gaussian tails are discussed also.     

A MONTE CARLO COMPARISON OF VARIOUS ASYMPTOTIC APPROXIMATIONS TO THE DISTRIBUTION OF INSTRUMENTAL VARIABLES ESTIMATORS

ABSTRACT

We examine empirical relevance of three alternative asymptotic approximations to the distribution of instrumental variables estimators by Monte Carlo experiments. We find that conventional asymptotics provides a reasonable approximation to the actual distribution of instrumental variables estimators when the sample size is reasonably large. For most sample sizes, we find Bekker[11] Bekker, P. A. 1994. Alternative Approximations to the Distributions of Instrumental Variable Estimators. Econometrica, 62: 657–681. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] asymptotics provides reasonably good approximation even when the first stage R ² is very small. We conclude that reporting Bekker[11] Bekker, P. A. 1994. Alternative Approximations to the Distributions of Instrumental Variable Estimators. Econometrica, 62: 657–681. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] confidence interval would suffice for most microeconometric (cross-sectional) applications, and the comparative advantage of Staiger and Stock[5] Staiger, D. and Stock, J. H. 1997. Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments. Econometrica, 65: 556–586. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] asymptotic approximation is in applications with sample sizes typical in macroeconometric (time series) applications.     

A study of uniformity pattern for extended designs

The objective of this paper is to investigate the issue of projection discrepancy for extended U-type or nearly U-type extended designs along the line of Fang and Qin (2005 Fang, K. T., and H. Qin. 2005. Uniformity pattern and related criteria for two-level factorials. Science China Series A 48:1–11.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) based on the centered L₂-discrepancy proposed in Hickernell (1998 Hickernell, F. J. 1998. A generalized discrepancy and quadrature error bound. Mathematics of Computation 67:299–322.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Extended designs are obtained through augmenting optimally few runs (or points) to an optimal U-type design. Lower bounds to projection discrepancy with reference to the centered L₂-discrepancy of extended designs have been obtained. Some illustrative examples are also provided.     

Skewing and Generalized Jackknifing in Kernel Density Estimation

Abstract

Kernel methods are very popular in nonparametric density estimation. In this article we suggest a simple estimator which reduces the bias to the fourth power of the bandwidth, while the variance of the estimator increases only by at most a moderate constant factor. Our proposal turns out to be a fourth order kernel estimator and may be regarded as a new version of the generalized jackknifing approach (Schucany W. R., Sommers, J. P. (1977 Schucany, W. R. and Sommers, J. P. 1977. Improvement of kernel type estimators. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 72: 420–423. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Improvement of Kernal type estimators. Journal of the American Statistical Association 72:420–423.) applied to kernel density estimation.     

Bayes minimax ridge regression estimators

The problem of estimating of the vector β of the linear regression model y = Aβ + ? with ? ～ N_p(0, σ²I_p) under quadratic loss function is considered when common variance σ² is unknown. We first find a class of minimax estimators for this problem which extends a class given by Maruyama and Strawderman (2005 Maruyama, Y., and W. E. Strawderman. 2005. A new class of generalized Bayes minimax ridge regression estimators. Annals of Statistics 33:1753–70.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and using these estimators, we obtain a large class of (proper and generalized) Bayes minimax estimators and show that the result of Maruyama and Strawderman (2005 Maruyama, Y., and W. E. Strawderman. 2005. A new class of generalized Bayes minimax ridge regression estimators. Annals of Statistics 33:1753–70.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is a special case of our result. We also show that under certain conditions, these generalized Bayes minimax estimators have greater numerical stability (i.e., smaller condition number) than the least-squares estimator.