In psoriatic arthritis, it is important to understand the joint activity (represented by swelling and pain) and damage processes because both are related to severe physical disability. The paper aims to provide a comprehensive investigation into both processes occurring over time, in particular their relationship, by specifying a joint multistate model at the individual hand joint level, which ...

Epidemiology is the study of patterns of health-related states or events in populations. Statistical models developed for epidemiology could be usefully applied to behavioral states or events. The aim of this study is to present the application of epidemiological statistics to understand animal behavior where discrete outcomes are of interest, using data from guide dogs to illustrate. Specifica...

We extend a system-of-systems framework previously proposed by the authors to evaluate the safety and physical resilience of a critical plant exposed to risk of external events. The extension is based on a multistate representation of the different degrees of damage of the individual components and the different degrees of safety of the critical plant. We resort to a hierarchical model represen...

The Campbellian tradition provides a conceptual framework to assess threats to validity. On the other hand, different models of causal analysis have been developed to control estimation biases in different research designs. However, the link between design features, measurement issues, and concrete impact estimation analyses is weak. In order to provide an empirical solution to this problem, we...

Steele et al. (2005) describe a general framework for the analysis of correlated event histories, with an application to a study of partnership transitions and fertility among a cohort of British women. A multilevel multistate competing risks model is used to examine the relationship between prior fertility outcomes (the presence and characteristics of children and current pregnancy) and the di...

New statistical models for analysing survival data in an intensive care unit context have recently been developed. Two models that offer significant advantages over standard survival analyses are competing risks models and multistate models. Wolkewitz and colleagues used a competing risks model to examine survival times for nosocomial pneumonia and mortality. Their model was able to incorporate...

We discuss and evaluate the Multi-State Plan (MSP) Program, a provision of the Affordable Care Act that has not been the subject of much debate as yet. The MSP Program provides the Office of Personnel Management with new authority to negotiate and implement multistate insurance plans on all health insurance exchanges within the United States. We raise the concern that the MSP Program may lead t...