BACKGROUND/AIM Bipolar affective disorder is mental disorder with polygenic type of heredity. Heritability--relation between genetic and environmental variance is used to estimate the level of influence of genetic variance to phenotype variance. Study results show decreasing trend in the value of heritability of bipolar affective disorder, thus indicating that this disorder is a complex behavio...

BACKGROUND Variance in microarray studies has been widely discussed as a critical topic on the identification of differentially expressed genes; however, few studies have addressed the influence of estimating variance. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To break intra- and inter-individual variance in clinical studies down to three levels--technical, anatomic, and individual--we designed experime...

BACKGROUND Congenital heart defects (CHD) are known to cluster within families, but existing evidence varies for the estimates of familial relative risk (RR). We aimed to examine familial aggregation and heritability of CHD in the general population of Taiwan.Methods and Results:We conducted a population-based family study using the Taiwan National Health Insurance (NHI) research database. Indi...

Abstract: Rejection of coherent interference requires an array consisting of several identical sub-arrays which operates with spatial smoothing algorithms. For the cases in which such array configuration cannot be obtained, other schemes must be employed to decouple the desired signal and the coherent interference. This paper presents a coherent interference suppression scheme, known as, the co...

This study proposes robust means modeling (RMM) approaches for hypothesis testing of mean differences for between-subjects designs in order to control the biasing effects of nonnormality and variance inequality. Drawing from structural equation modeling (SEM), the RMM approaches make no assumption of variance homogeneity and employ robust estimation/rescaling strategies in order to alleviate re...

It is well known that the independence of sample mean and variance characterizes normal distribution. By using Anosov’s theorem, we further investigate analogous characteristic properties in terms some feasible definite statistics. The latter statistics introduced this paper for first time are based on nonnegative, continuous functions ordered arguments with positive degree homogeneity. propose...

We propose an operational degree of polarization in terms of the variance of the Stokes vector minimized over all the directions of the Poincaré sphere. We examine the properties of this second-order definition and carry out its experimental determination. Quantum states with the same standard (first-order) degree of polarization are correctly discriminated by this new measure. We argue that a ...

A Bayesian method is developed for estimating neural responses to stimuli, using likelihood functions incorporating the assumption that spike trains follow either pure Poisson statistics or Poisson statistics with a refractory period. The Bayesian and standard estimates of the mean and variance of responses are similar and asymptotically converge as the size of the data sample increases. Howeve...

Variance parameters in mixed or multilevel models can be difficult to estimate, especially when the number of groups is small. Here we address the problem that the group-level variance estimate is often on the boundary. We propose a maximum penalized likelihood approach which is equivalent to estimating the variance by its marginal posterior mode, given a weakly informative prior distribution. ...