Bridge Estimation for Linear Regression Models with Mixing Properties

Penalized regression methods have for quite some time been a popular choice for addressing challenges in high dimensional data analysis. Despite their popularity, their application to time series data has been limited. This paper concerns bridge penalized methods in a linear regression time series model. We first prove consistency, sparsity and asymptotic normality of bridge estimators under a general mixing model. Next, as a special case of mixing errors, we consider bridge regression with autoregressive and moving average (ARMA) error models and develop a computational algorithm that can simultaneously select important predictors and the orders of ARMA models. Simulated and real data examples demonstrate the effective performance of the proposed algorithm and the improvement over ordinary bridge regression.     

Semiparametric Bayesian hierarchical models for heterogeneous population in nonlinear mixed effect model: application to gastric emptying studies

Gastric emptying studies are frequently used in medical research, both human and animal, when evaluating the effectiveness and determining the unintended side-effects of new and existing medications, diets, and procedures or interventions. It is essential that gastric emptying data be appropriately summarized before making comparisons between study groups of interest and to allow study the comparisons. Since gastric emptying data have a nonlinear emptying curve and are longitudinal data, nonlinear mixed effect (NLME) models can accommodate both the variation among measurements within individuals and the individual-to-individual variation. However, the NLME model requires strong assumptions that are often not satisfied in real applications that involve a relatively small number of subjects, have heterogeneous measurement errors, or have large variation among subjects. Therefore, we propose three semiparametric Bayesian NLMEs constructed with Dirichlet process priors, which automatically cluster sub-populations and estimate heterogeneous measurement errors. To compare three semiparametric models with the parametric model we propose a penalized posterior Bayes factor. We compare the performance of our semiparametric hierarchical Bayesian approaches with that of the parametric Bayesian hierarchical approach. Simulation results suggest that our semiparametric approaches are more robust and flexible. Our gastric emptying studies from equine medicine are used to demonstrate the advantage of our approaches.     

SiZer analysis for the comparison of time series

SiZer (SIgnificant ZERo crossing of the derivatives) is a scale-space visualization tool for statistical inferences. In this paper we introduce a graphical device, which is based on SiZer, for the test of the equality of the mean of two time series. The estimation of the quantile in a confidence interval is theoretically justified by advanced distribution theory. The extension of the proposed method to the comparison of more than two time series is also done using residual analysis. A broad numerical study is conducted to demonstrate the sample performance of the proposed tool. In addition, asymptotic properties of SiZer for the comparison of two time series are investigated.     

A test for multivariate structure

We present a test for detecting 'multivariate structure' in data sets. This procedure consists of transforming the data to remove the correlations, then discretizing the data and, finally, studying the cell counts in the resulting contingency table. A formal test can be performed using the usual chi-squared test statistic. We give the limiting distribution of the chi-squared statistic and also present simulation results to examine the accuracy of this limiting distribution in finite samples. Several examples show that our procedure can detect a variety of different types of structure. Our examples include data with clustering, digitized speech data, and residuals from a fitted time series model. The chi-squared statistic can also be used as a test for multivariate normality.     

Analysis of ordered covariate effects among groups with repeated measurements

Testing procedures for ordered covariate effects are developed in the repeated measures experiment. The maximum likelihood estimators of covariate effects under the ordered hypothesis are approximated by the isotonic regression of their unconstrained estimators. The asymptotic null distributions of the test statistics are chi-bar-square distributions which are mixtures of chi-square distributions. A Monte-Carlo simulation reveals that the proposed test for ordered covariate effects is seriously more powerful than the usual chi-square test that neglects the information on the order restriction. These testing methods are applied for analyzing the effect of vitamin E diet supplement on growth rate of animals.     

Asian and Pacific Region Authorship Characteristics in Leading Library and Information Science Journals

Authorship characteristics from the Asian and Pacific region in the top twenty journals in library and information science are studied. Data was collected searching the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science databases. Major findings of this study are: there are a total of 1,317 articles for the period 1967 to 2005; the most productive countries are, in rank order, Australia, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines; and 77.6 percent of authors in the top twenty library and information science journals contributed a single article. Among the library science journals about 50 percent were written by multiple authors, while 73.1 percent of articles in the information science journals were written collaboratively. The most productive individual authors in the region are reported. The strongest collaboration within the region took place between Australia and China; China and Singapore; Australia and New Zealand.     

Selection of Binary Variables and Classification by Boosting

We adopt boosting for classification and selection of high-dimensional binary variables for which classical methods based on normality and non singular sample dispersion are inapplicable. Boosting seems particularly well suited for binary variables. We present three methods of which two combine boosting with the relatively classical variable selection methods developed in Wilbur et al. (2002 Wilbur , J. D. , Ghosh , J. K. , Nakatsu , C. H. , Brouder , S. M. , Doerge , R. W. ( 2002 ). Variable selection in high-dimensional multivariate binary data with application to the analysis of microbial community DNA fingerprints . Biometrics 58 : 378 – 386 . [Google Scholar]). Our primary interest is variable selection in classification with small misclassification error being used as validation of proposed method for variable selection. Two of the new methods perform uniformly better than Wilbur et al. (2002 Wilbur , J. D. , Ghosh , J. K. , Nakatsu , C. H. , Brouder , S. M. , Doerge , R. W. ( 2002 ). Variable selection in high-dimensional multivariate binary data with application to the analysis of microbial community DNA fingerprints . Biometrics 58 : 378 – 386 . [Google Scholar]) in one set of simulated and three real life examples.