This paper presents a case study in longitudinal data analysis where the goal is to estimate the efficacy of a new drug for treatment of MDD. Data characteristic indicate: 1. Subjects from different treatment groups drop out differentially across time. 2. There are a high proportion of subjects who never experience any response. To overcome these challenges, we developed a logistic random-effec...

Dairy cattle evaluation schemes routinely assume homogeneous variance with respect to environment. Increasing evidence suggests the presence of systematic changes in variance components associated with mean level of performance. Best linear unbiased prediction procedures that account for heterogeneity are reviewed. The consequences of incorrectly assuming homogeneity for evaluation are demonstr...

Given increasing evidence that medical care cannot fully explain variation in population health and increasing research on the relationship between socioeconomic factors and health, might non-health policies affect health? This research examines whether Supplemental Security Income (SSI) affects disability among the elderly. We use the 1990 and 2000 censuses, employing state and year fixed effe...

The differences in demographic and life-history processes between organisms living in the same population have important consequences for ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Modern statistical and computational methods allow the investigation of individual and shared (among homogeneous groups) determinants of the observed variation in growth. We use an Empirical Bayes approach to estimate ind...

A simplified model for the growth of a population is studied in which random effects arise because reproducing individuals have a certain probability of surviving until the next breeding season and hence contributing to the next generation. The resulting Markov chain is that of a branching process with a known generating function. For parameter values leading to non-extinction, an approximating...

The results on optimal diallel cross designs are based on standard linear model assumptions where the general combining ability effects are taken as fixed. In many practical situations, this assumption may not be tenable since often one studies only a sample of inbred lines from a possibly large hypothetical population. A random effects model is proposed in this paper that allows us to obtain a...

In this paper, we propose a new method for longitudinal shape analysis that fits a linear mixed-effects model, while simultaneously optimizing correspondences on a set of anatomical shapes. Shape changes are modeled in a hierarchical fashion, with the global population trend as a fixed effect and individual trends as random effects. The statistical significance of the estimated trends are evalu...

China is experiencing urbanization at an unprecedented rate over the last two decades. The overall goal of this paper is to understand the extent of and the factors driving urban expansion in China from the late-1980s to 2000. We use a unique three-period panel data set of high-resolution satellite imagery data and socioeconomic data for entire area of coterminous China. Consistent with a numbe...

Several methods used in fisheries stock assessment models that can be applied to population viability analysis are presented. (1) Integrated analysis allows the use of all information on a particular population, and ensures that all model assumptions and parameter are consistent throughout the analysis, that uncertainty is propagated throughout the analysis, and that the correlation among param...

PracTools is an R package with functions that compute sample sizes for various types of finite population sampling designs when totals or means are estimated. One-, two-, and three-stage designs are covered as well as allocations for stratified sampling and probability proportional to size sampling. Sample allocations can be computed that minimize the variance of an estimator subject to a budge...