A novel PCR restriction analysis method using the RNA polymerase beta-subunit- coding gene (rpoB) was employed to both detect and identify Helicobacter pylori in biopsy specimens and culture isolates. The rpoB DNAs (458 bp) were specifically amplified by PCR with the Helicobacter-specific primers (HF and HR). Based on the determined rpoB sequences of the culture isolates, an H. pylori-specific ...

Longitudinal studies are used in mental health research and services studies. The dominant approaches for longitudinal data analysis are the generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMM) and the weighted generalized estimating equations (WGEE). Although both classes of models have been extensively published and widely applied, differences between and limitations about these methods are not cle...

The empirical (sandwich or robust) covariance matrix, usually used in conjunction with Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM), is biased towards zero for small sample sizes. As a consequence of this bias Type I error rates are usually higher than the nominal levels. Several small sample bias corrections have been proposed in the literature. The purpose...

Animal models are generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) used in evolutionary biology and animal breeding to identify the genetic part of traits. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is a methodology for making fast non-sampling based Bayesian inference for hierarchical Gaussian Markov models. In this paper we demonstrate that the INLA methodology can be used for many versions of Bayes...

Relative Survival is the ratio of the overall survival of a group of patients to the expected survival for a demographically similar group. It is commonly used in disease registries to estimate the effect of a particular disease when the true cause of death is not reliably known. Regression models for relative survival have been described and we extend these models to allow for clustered respon...

Abstract: Modeling diagnostics assess models by means of a variety of criteria. Each criterion typically performs its evaluation upon a specific inferential objective. For instance, the well-known DFBETAS in linear regression models are a modeling diagnostic which is applied to discover the influential cases in fitting a model. To facilitate the evaluation of generalized linear mixed models (GL...

How should ecologists and evolutionary biologists analyze nonnormal data that involve random effects? Nonnormal data such as counts or proportions often defy classical statistical procedures. Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) provide a more flexible approach for analyzing nonnormal data when random effects are present. The explosion of research on GLMMs in the last decade has generated co...