DerSimonian and Laird define meta-analysis as “the statistical analysis of a collection of analytic results for the purpose of integrating their findings. One alternative to classical meta-analytic approaches in known as Individual Patient-Level Data, or IPD, meta-analysis. Rather than depending on summary statistics calculated for individual studies, IPD metaanalysis analyzes the complete data...

INTRODUCTION Several well-established determinants of health are associated with premature mortality. Using data from the 2010 County Health Rankings, we describe the association of selected determinants of health with premature mortality among counties with broadly differing levels of income. METHODS County-level data on 3,139 US counties from the 2010 County Health Rankings were linked to c...

INTRODUCTION Reducing racial health disparities is often stated as a population health goal, but specific targets for such improvement are seldom set. It is often assumed that improving overall health outcomes will be linked to disparity reduction, but this is not necessarily the case. METHODS We compared the annual change from 1999 through 2013 in combined-race (black and white) mortality wi...

BACKGROUND Living in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas is associated with increased -childhood mortality risks. As city living becomes the predominant social context in low- and middle-income countries, the resulting rapid urbanization together with the poor economic circumstances of these countries greatly increases the risks of mortality for children < 5 years of age (under-5 mortality). ...

We've started to answer the questions of what we can model through EDM, and we're getting better and better at modeling each year. We publish papers that present solid numbers under reasonably stringent cross-validation, and we find that our models don't just agree with training labels, but can predict future performance and engagement as well. We're making progress as a field in figuring out h...

Natural selection was studied in the context of density-dependent population growth using a single locus, continuous time model for the rates of change of population size and allele frequency. The maximization principle of density-dependent selection was applied to a class of fitness expressions with explicit recruitment and mortality terms. Three general results were obtained: First, at low po...

Distortions in private investment due to credit frictions, and in public investment due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies, have both been suggested as important factors in accounting for the cross-country per capita income distribution. We introduce two modiÞcations to the standard one-sector neoclassical growth model to incorporate these distortions. The model is calibrated using d...

For over a century, harvests of eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) have been declining in the northeast. This trend has been particularly acute in the mid-Atlantic region where two diseases, MSX and Dermo, have caused catastrophic mortalities. With the reduction in natural populations, growers have increasingly turned to the use of hatchery technology for annual supplies of seed oysters. T...

In order to assess the future impact of environmental change, ecologists must be able to provide accurate predictions under new environmental conditions. The difficulty with this is that there is often no way of knowing whether the empirical relationships upon which model predictions are based will hold under the new conditions. As a consequence, such predictions are of uncertain accuracy. Beha...

We consider the problem of optimally separating two multivariate populations. Robust linear discriminant rules can be obtained by replacing the empirical means and covariance in the classical discriminant rules by S or MM-estimates of location and scatter. We propose to use a fast and robust bootstrap method to obtain inference for such a robust discriminant analysis. This is useful since class...