QUESTIONS UNDER STUDY Germ-line alterations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes account for 30-50% of all forms of familial breast and ovarian cancer syndromes. Specific mutations in specific populations and ethnic groups have been identified in BRCA1 and BRCA2. However, it is not known whether such specific mutations prevail in the Swiss population. METHODS We started to screen patients with primary br...

This paper investigates via a simulation study the effects of nonlinearities on several commonly used order selection criteria. The most important finding of this study is that SIC, FPE, HQC and BIC perform considerably well in estimating the true autoregressive order, even in the presence of STAR or TAR nonlinearity. Thus we conclude that these criteria may be safely applied to determine the t...

Polynomial splines are used to estimate the log-hazard function based on possibly censored, positive data. Two additional log terms are incorporated into the fitted model for the log-hazard function to allow for greater flexibility in the extreme tails. A fully automatic procedure involving the maximum likelihood method, stepwise knot addition, stepwise knot deletion and BIC is used to select t...

We extend the basic idea of Schwarz (1978) and develop a generalized Bayesian information criterion for regression model selection. The new criterion relaxes the usually strong distributional assumption associated with Schwarz’s BIC by adopting a Wilcoxon-type dispersion function and appropriately adjusting the penalty term. We establish that the Wilcoxon-type generalized BIC preserves the cons...

It is widely known that when there are errors with a moving-average root close to −1, a high order augmented autoregression is necessary for unit root tests to have good size, but that information criteria such as the AIC and the BIC tend to select a truncation lag (k) that is very small. We consider a class of Modified Information Criteria (MIC) with a penalty factor that is sample dependent. ...

We propose new regression models for parameterising covariance structures in longitudinal data analysis. Using a novel Cholesky factor, the entries in this decomposition have a moving average and log innovation interpretation and are modeled as linear functions of covariates. We propose efficient maximum likelihood estimates for joint mean-covariance analysis based on this decomposition and der...

BACKGROUND IVF treatments for infertility involve the transfer of multiple embryos in any one treatment cycle. When data is available on individual embryos the outcomes of each embryo are only partially observed, as treatment outcome (live birth) is assessed at the patient level. Two-level Embryo-Uterus (EU) models have been developed which assume a biologically plausible mechanism and assume t...

BACKGROUND The two most frequently diagnosed cancers among women worldwide are breast and cervical cancers. The objective of the present study was to classify the different countries based on the death rates from sex specific cancers. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, we used dataset regarding death rate from breast, cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancers in 190 countries worldwide repor...

Model selection procedures often use a fixed penalty, such as Mallows’ Cp, to avoid choosing a model which fits a particular data set extremely well. These procedures are often devised to give an unbiased risk estimate when a particular chosen model is used to predict future responses. As a correction for not including the variability induced in model selection, generalized degrees of freedom i...

This research focuses on the generation of soundscapes using unstructured sound databases for the sonification of virtual environments. A generalized methodology for design based on soundscape categorization, perceptual discrimination of sources and media design principles is proposed, with the underlying principle of the composition of a source and a textural layer within any soundscape. A gen...