A total of 989,582 test-day records of 160,243 first-parity cows collected from 131 herds of Iranian Holstein dairy cows from 1995 to 2014 by the Animal Breeding and Improvement Centre of Iran, were used to determine the best model for lactation curves of fat to protein ratio (FPR) and somatic cell scores (SCS) in the first lactation. Several mathematical models including the Wood (WD), Wilmink...

Climate policies have stochastic consequences that involve a great number of generations. This calls for evaluating social risk (what kind of societies will future people be born into) rather than individual risk (what will happen to people during their own lifetimes). As a response we propose and axiomatize probability adjusted rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism (PARDCLU...

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistical test is commonly used to determine if data can be regarded as a sample from a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with specified continuous cdf F , but with small samples it can have insufficient power, i.e., its probability of rejecting natural alternatives can be too low. However, Durbin [1961] showed that the power of the KS test often can be increased...

Data were received from 24 test stations on 3,999 boars tested in fall 1984 and spring 1985. In an effort to increase the connectedness between stations, one reference sire was selected to produce sons (reference boars) through artificial insemination to be tested in the different stations. Fifty-two reference boars were placed across 17 of the test stations. The performance traits analyzed wer...

The Wilcoxon signed rank test is a frequently used nonparametric test for paired data (e.g., consisting of pre- and posttreatment measurements) based on independent units of analysis. This test cannot be used for paired comparisons arising from clustered data (e.g., if paired comparisons are available for each of two eyes of an individual). To incorporate clustering, a generalization of the ran...

Estimation and group comparison of survival curves are two very common issues in survival analysis. In practice, the Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival functions may be biased due to unbalanced distribution of confounders. Here we develop an adjusted Kaplan-Meier estimator (AKME) to reduce confounding effects using inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW). Each observation is weighted ...

Kaplan-Meier survival curves and the associated nonparametric log rank test statistic are methods of choice for unadjusted survival analyses, while the semiparametric Cox proportional hazards regression model is used ubiquitously as a method for covariate adjustment. The Cox model extends naturally to include covariates, but there is no generally accepted method to graphically depict adjusted s...

Sometimes the number of treatments to be compared is so large that a complete blocks experiment is impractical. This happens, for example, in some agronomic variety trials. A balanced incomplete block (BIB) design can be used in such a situation. In sensory evaluation trials loss of sensitivity can occur when the subjects are not be able to compare more than a few products with any certainty. A...