BACKGROUND Observational studies and small intervention studies suggest alcohol raises gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT). We used Mendelian randomization to assess the causal effect of alcohol use on GGT in older Chinese people. METHODS An instrumental variable (IV) analysis in 2,321 men and 2,757 women aged 50+ years from phase 3 of the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study with ALDH2 (rs671) genotyp...

An analysis method previously used to detect observed intrato multidecadal (IMD) climate regimes was adapted to compare observed and modeled IMD climate variations. Pending the availability of the more appropriate phase 5 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP-5) simulations, the method is demonstrated using CMIP-3 model simulations. Although the CMIP-3 experimental design will almost cert...

In this article, we propose a class of test statistics for change point in the mean high-dimensional independent data. Our integrates U-statistic based approach recent work by Wang et al. and Lq-norm He al., inherits several appealing features such as being tuning parameter free asymptotic independence corresponding to even q’s. A simple combination different q’s leads with adaptive power prope...

Suppose we observe an invertible linear process with independent mean-zero innovations and with coefficients depending on a finitedimensional parameter, and we want to estimate the expectation of some function under the stationary distribution of the process. The usual estimator would be the empirical estimator. It can be improved using the fact that the innovations are centered. We construct a...

This article introduces an original methodology based on empirical likelihood, which aims at combining different food contamination and consumption surveys to provide risk managers with a risk measure, taking into account all the available information. This risk index is defined as the probability that exposure to a contaminant exceeds a safe dose. It is naturally expressed as a nonlinear funct...

Imprecise Dirichlet Process-based tests (IDP-tests, for short) have been recently introduced in the literature. They overcome the problem of deciding how to select a single prior in Bayesian hypothesis testing, in the absence of prior information. They make use of a “near-ignorance” model, that behaves a priori as a vacuous model for some basic inferences, but it provides non-vacuous posterior ...

A prognostic model that predicts overall survival (OS) for metastatic urothelial cancer (MetUC) patients treated with cisplatin-based chemotherapy was developed, validated, and compared with a commonly used Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) risk-score model. Data from 7 protocols that enrolled 308 patients with MetUC were pooled. An external multi-institutional dataset was used to ...

Often it is desired to test a composite null hypothesis against a composite alternative that is not in the same parametric family as the null hypothesis. For example, suppose we have independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) observations U,, .., U, and we wish to test the hypothesis that these observations arise from a normal distribution against the alternative that they rise from a logist...

Control charts are effective tools for signal detection in both manufacturing processes and service processes. Much of the data in service industries comes from processes having nonnormal or unknown distributions. The commonly used Shewhart variable control charts, which depend heavily on the normality assumption, are not appropriately used here. We propose a new variance control chart based on...

Very recently, Ehrenborg and Steingrı́msson [7] studied enumerative properties of the excedance statistic. Let Sn denote the permutation group on the set {1, 2, . . . , n} and π = π1 π2 · · ·πn ∈ Sn . An excedance in π is an index i such that πi > i . Following [7], we encode the excedance set of a permutation as a word in the letters a and b. The excedance word w(π) of π is the ab-word w1w2 · ·...