Dimension reduction and variable selection play important roles in high dimensional data analysis. The sparse MAVE, a model-free variable selection method, is a nice combination of shrinkage estimation, Lasso, and an effective dimension reduction method,MAVE (minimum average variance estimation). However, it is not robust to outliers in the dependent variable because of the use of least-squares...

BACKGROUND Protective antibody immunity against the influenza A virus wanes in 2-7 years due to antigenic drift of the virus' surface proteins. The duration of immune protection is highly variable because antigenic evolution of the virus is irregular. Currently, the variable nature of the duration of immunity has had little attention in analyses of the impact of vaccination, including cost-effe...

this study investigates the effects of the government effectiveness and financial development indices on economic growth in d-8 countries over the period 1996-2012, by applying the panel smooth transition regression (pstr) model. for this purpose, we use non-linear least squares (nls) method for estimation of model. the estimation results reject the linearity hypothesis, and estimate two regime...

OBJECTIVE To compare the effectiveness and renal safety of treatment with tenofovir versus entecavir in patients with chronic hepatitis-B. METHODS Retrospective study in hepatitis-B patients who initiated treatment with tenofovir or entecavir since January 1998 until 2013. The primary effectiveness variable was defined as viral DNA < 20 UI/ml (HBV-DNA) and the variable for renal safety was va...

This paper reviews the current knowledge of gas phase bromine photochemistry and presents a budget study of atmospheric bromine species. The effectiveness of the ozone catalytic loss cycles involving bromine is quantified by considering their chain length and effectiveness. The chain effectiveness i a new variable defined as the chain length multiplied by the rate of the cycle's rate-limiting s...