North-east Atlantic mackerel spawning distribution has shifted northward in the last three decades probably in response to global sea warming. Yet, uncertainties subsist regarding on the shift rate, causalities, and how this species will respond to future conditions. Using egg surveys, we explored the influence of temperature change on mackerel’s spawning distribution (western and southern spaw...

Extant analyses of the relation between economic conditions and population health were often based on annualized data and were susceptible to confounding by nonlinear time trends. In the present study, the authors used generalized additive models with nonparametric smoothing splines to examine the association between economic conditions, including levels of economic activity in New York State a...

The Stanford Heart Transplant data were collected to model survival in patients using penalized smoothing splines for covariates whose values change over the course of the study. The basic idea of the present study is to use a logistic regression model and a generalized additive model with B-splines to estimate the survival function. We model survival time as a function of patient covariates an...

In actuarial hteramre, researchers suggested various statistical procedures to estimate the parameters in claim count or frequency model. In particular, the Poisson regression model, which is also known as the Generahzed Linear Model (GLM) with Poisson error structure, has been x~adely used in the recent years. However, it is also recognized that the count or frequency data m insurance practice...

A probabilistic precipitation forecasting model using generalized additive models (GAMs) and Bayesian model averaging (BMA) was proposed in this paper. GAMs were used to fit the spatial-temporal precipitation models to individual ensemble member forecasts. The distributions of the precipitation occurrence and the cumulative precipitation amount were represented simultaneously by a single Tweedi...

In press. Predicting species distributions from museum and herbarium records using multiresponse models fitted with multivariate adaptive regression splines. Diversity and Distributions. (A) Abstract 1 Current circumstances-that the majority of species distribution records exist as 2 presence-only data (e.g., from museums and herbaria), and that there is an established need 3 for predictions of...

This study explores patterns of medicinal plant species richness along an elevational gradient in Nepal and the effectiveness of existing protected areas for their conservation. We used published data on the distribution of medicinal plants. The number of medicinal plants and the number of protected areas present in each 100 m elevation band were collated by interpolation. We tested the number ...

We describe a unification of old and recent ideas for formulating graphical models to explain time series data, including Granger causality, semi-automated search procedures for graphical causal models, modeling of contemporaneous influences in times series, and heuristic generalized additive model corrections to linear models. We illustrate the procedures by finding a structure of exogenous va...

Zero inflation problem is very common in ecological studies as well as other areas. We propose the COnstrained Zero-Inflated Generalized Additive Model (COZIGAM) for analyzing zero-inflated data. Our approach assumes that the response follows some distribution from the zero-inflated 1-parameter exponential family, with the further assumption that the probability of zero inflation is some monoto...