Frailty has been introduced as a group-wise random effect to describe the within-group dependence for correlated survival data. In this article, we propose a penalized joint likelihood method for nonparametric estimation of hazard function. With the proposed method, the frailty variance component and the smoothing parameters become the tuning parameters that are selected to minimize a loss func...

We study a flexible class of non-proportional hazard function regression models in which the influence of the covariates splits into the sum of a parametric part and a time-dependent nonparametric part. We develop a method of covariate selection for the parametric part by adjusting for the implicit fitting of the nonparametric part. Our approach is based on the general model selection methodolo...

Abstract A site-specific probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) was achieved in the area of special economic zone authority Duqm, involving evaluation at bedrock conditions and assurance potential site influence on ground motion bedrock. Appropriate source ground-motion prediction models were selected hazards identified by means 5% damped Uniform Hazard Spectra (UHS) for three return pe...

f the mid-1990s through 2001 two of the West’s most implacable terrorist foes, Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Khabab, carried on what appears to have been a long-running feud within al-Qaeda, a feud that came to an end only when Abu Hafs al-Masri was killed by the U.S. military. Abu Hafs joined al-Qaeda early on and served as the group’s military commander from 1996 onward. Abu Khabab was a member o...

Toward the establishment of evidence-based recommendations for the prevention of prostate cancer recurrence after treatment, we examined the association between smoking and prostate cancer recurrence in a retrospective cohort study of 1416 men who underwent radical prostatectomy. Surgeries were performed by a single surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital between January 1, 1993, and March 31, 2006. ...