Advanced variance-covariance structures are commonly used in genetic evaluation of crops to account for micro-site variability and achieve higher accuracy of predictions to increase selection efficiency. Various genetic variance-covariance structures were explored to predict best linear unbiased genetic merits of 453 loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) cloned progeny tested at 16 different locations...

348 words) Background: The assessment of population health has traditionally relied on the population’s average health measured by mortality related indicators. Researchers and policy-makers have increasingly recognized the importance of including information on health inequality and healthrelated quality of life (HRQL) in the assessment of population health. The objective of this study is to a...

Phase variance-based motion contrast is demonstrated using two phase analysis methods in a spectral domain optical coherence tomography system. Mobility contrast is demonstrated for an intensity matched Intralipid solution placed without flow within agarose wells. Vasculature oriented transversely to the imaging direction has been imaged for 3-4 dpf in vivo zebrafish using the phase variance co...

Noise reduction is often formulated as a linear filtering problem in the frequency domain. With this formulation, the core issue of noise reduction becomes how to design an optimal frequency-domain filter that can significantly suppress noise without introducing perceptually noticeable speech distortion. While higher-order information can be used, most existing approaches use only second-order ...

We present here a framework for the study of molecular variation within a single species. Information on DNA haplotype divergence is incorporated into an analysis of variance format, derived from a matrix of squared-distances among all pairs of haplotypes. This analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) produces estimates of variance components and F-statistic analogs, designated here as phi-statis...

Because of uncertainty and noise, the brain should use accurate internal models of the statistics of objects in scenes to interpret sensory signals. Moreover, the brain should adapt its internal models to the statistics within local stimulus contexts. Consider the problem of hitting a baseball. The impoverished nature of the visual information available makes it imperative that batters use know...

In this paper we study U-statistics with side information incorporated using the method of empirical likelihood. Some basic properties of the proposed statistics are investigated. We find that by implementing the side information properly, the proposed U-statistics can have smaller asymptotic variance than the existing U-statistics in the literature. The proposed U-statistics can achieve asympt...

The highly charged debate over the safety of home birth was inflamed by the publication of a meta-analysis by Joseph R. Wax and coworkers, which concluded that "less medical intervention during planned home birth is associated with a tripling of the neonatal mortality rate." The statistical analysis upon which this conclusion was based was deeply flawed, containing many numerical errors, improp...

Problem: To simplify the computation of the variance in before-after studies, it is generally assumed that the observed crash data for each entity (or observation) are Poisson distributed. Given the characteristics of this distribution, the observed value ( i x ) for each entity is implicitly made equal to its variance. However, the variance should be estimated using the conditional properties ...

Humans are fast and accurate in categorizing complex natural images. It is, however, unclear what features of visual information are exploited by brain to perceive the images with such speed and accuracy. It has been shown that low-level contrast statistics of natural scenes can explain the variance of amplitude of event-related potentials (ERP) in response to rapidly presented images. In this ...