Heterogeneity in treatment effects across diverse populations

Differences in patient characteristics, including age, sex, and race influence the safety and effectiveness of drugs, biologic products, and medical devices. Here we provide a summary of the topics discussed during the opening panel at the 2018 Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation symposium on Assessing and Communicating Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects for Patient Subpopulations: Challenges and Opportunities. The goal of this session was to provide a brief overview of FDA-regulated therapeutics, including drugs, biologics and medical devices, and some of the major sources of heterogeneity of treatment effects (HTE) related to patient demographics, such as age, sex and race. The panel discussed the US Food and Drug Administration's role in reviewing and regulating drugs, devices, and biologic products and the challenges associated with ensuring that diverse patient populations benefit from these therapeutics. Ultimately, ensuring diverse demographic inclusion in clinical trials, and designing basic and clinical research studies to account for the intended patient population's age, sex, race, and genetic factors among other characteristics, will lead to better, safer therapies for diverse patient populations.     

西北五省经济人口承载力的分析及预测

对于中国这个人口大国,人口承载力是一个值得研究和关注的课题,西北五省在人们的印象中是地广人稀,学界对该地区的人口承载力的研究大都从自然资源的角度探讨,然而本文不考虑自然因素的作用,认为一个区域资源的稀缺可以通过经济技术解决,只是成本高低的问题,因此仅从经济人口承载力的角度分析,利用P-E-R模型分析西北五省人口承载力,并利用ARIMA模型对2012-2015年该地区人口承载力进行预测,并得出相关结论.     

Revisiting retesting in the estimation of proportions by group testing

In the estimation of a proportion p by group testing (pooled testing), retesting of units within positive groups has received little attention due to the minimal gain in precision compared to testing additional units. If acquisition of additional units is impractical or too expensive, and testing is not destructive, we show that retesting can be a useful option. We propose the retesting of a random grouping of units from positive groups, and compare it with nested halving procedures suggested by others. We develop an estimator of p for our proposed method, and examine its variance properties. Using simulation we compare retesting methods across a range of group testing situations, and show that for most realistic scenarios, our method is more efficient.     

Rare and clustered population estimation using the adaptive cluster sampling with some robust measures

The use of robust measures helps to increase the precision of the estimators, especially for the estimation of extremely skewed distributions. In this article, a generalized ratio estimator is proposed by using some robust measures with single auxiliary variable under the adaptive cluster sampling (ACS) design. We have incorporated tri-mean (TM), mid-range (MR) and Hodges-Lehman (HL) of the auxiliary variable as robust measures together with some conventional measures. The expressions of bias and mean square error (MSE) of the proposed generalized ratio estimator are derived. Two types of numerical study have been conducted using artificial clustered population and real data application to examine the performance of the proposed estimator over the usual mean per unit estimator under simple random sampling (SRS). Related results of the simulation study show that the proposed estimators provide better estimation results on both real and artificial population over the competing estimators.     

陕西省人口城市化Logistic模型及其应用——基于结构突变的理论分析

城市化是走向现代化的必经阶段,准确的城市化预测是进行经济、社会建设的基础。在结构突变理论的基础上,用Logistic模型对1978～2010年陕西城市化率进行分析。结论表明：1999年为陕西城市化率的结构突变点,说明城市化率的增长受到外部冲击的影响,分段以后的拟合优度明显提高。分别以阈值0.8和1进行分阶段构建的Logistic拟合精度明显提高,但阈值为1的精度更高,说明陕西城市化还在加速,预测表明到2030年陕西城市化率将达到70%左右。总体而言,从1984年到2030年为陕西省城市化的加速阶段。城市化加速阶段的住房问题、人口膨胀、环境恶化、交通拥挤、社会治安问题必须妥善解决。     

Assessing respondent-driven sampling: A simulation study across different networks

The purpose was to assess RDS estimators in populations simulated with diverse connectivity characteristics, incorporating the putative influence of misreported degrees and transmission processes. Four populations were simulated using different random graph models. Each population was “infected” using four different transmission processes. From each combination of population x transmission, one thousand samples were obtained using a RDS-like sampling strategy. Three estimators were used to predict the population-level prevalence of the “infection”. Several types of misreported degrees were simulated. Also, samples were generated using the standard random sampling method and the respective prevalence estimates, using the classical frequentist estimator. Estimation biases in relation to population parameters were assessed, as well as the variance. Variability was associated with the connectivity characteristics of each simulated population. Clustered populations yield greater variability and no RDS-based strategy could address the estimation biases. Misreporting degrees had modest effects, especially when RDS estimators were used. The best results for RDS-based samples were observed when the “infection” was randomly attributed, without any relation with the underlying network structure.     

2000—2010年广东省老年人口空间分布演变研究

根据2000年第五次人口普查数据、2010年第六次人口普查数据和相关社会经济统计数据,利用地理信息系统技术对广东省老年人口空间分布变化和特征进行分析,阐明导致该空间格局演变的主要原因,并据此提出完善养老服务的建议,主要包括：全面提高全省医疗卫生服务水平;经济落后的、老人比例较高的地区应完善公办老年公寓、托老所、老人活动中心等相关养老福利的落实;经济发达的、老人比例较低的地区除提供基本养老福利以外,还可以尝试新型老人居住模式,如旧社区适老性改造、商住—养老复合社区等。     

Estimation of the parameter of a dynamically selected population for two subclasses of the exponential family

We introduce the problem of estimation of the parameters of a dynamically selected population in an infinite sequence of random variables and provide its application in the statistical inference based on record values from a non stationary scheme. We develop unbiased estimation of the parameters of the dynamically selected population and evaluate the risk of the estimators. We provide comparisons with natural estimators and obtain asymptotic results. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of the results using real data.     

基于ANSYS的压力容器表面凹坑缺陷安全评定分析

采用通用有限元程序ANSYS建立了移动式压力容器筒体外壁表面凹坑（轴向和周向）的有限元模型。结合筒体表面凹坑的应力理论计算，研究探讨了在恒定内压下，筒体表面凹坑缺陷处的应力分布与凹坑几何尺寸之间的关系。以第三强度理论作为仿真终止判据，获取凹坑各几何参量的阈值，利用MATLAB对阈值进行最小二乘拟合，绘制出凹坑缺陷的安全评估参考曲线。拟合结果表明：轴向和周向凹坑对筒体局部结构强度的影响不同，对应的安全评估参考曲线存在区别。     

少数民族流动人口突发事件风险管理体系研究简

对少数民族流动人口突发事件风险管理体系进行探讨具有重要的现实意义；对其管理过程中的风险识别、评估、处置及善后审视等几个环节的操作过程进行考察，是研究其之关键因素。