Relative Survival is the ratio of the overall survival of a group of patients to the expected survival for a demographically similar group. It is commonly used in disease registries to estimate the effect of a particular disease when the true cause of death is not reliably known. Regression models for relative survival have been described and we extend these models to allow for clustered respon...

Abstract: Modeling diagnostics assess models by means of a variety of criteria. Each criterion typically performs its evaluation upon a specific inferential objective. For instance, the well-known DFBETAS in linear regression models are a modeling diagnostic which is applied to discover the influential cases in fitting a model. To facilitate the evaluation of generalized linear mixed models (GL...

How should ecologists and evolutionary biologists analyze nonnormal data that involve random effects? Nonnormal data such as counts or proportions often defy classical statistical procedures. Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) provide a more flexible approach for analyzing nonnormal data when random effects are present. The explosion of research on GLMMs in the last decade has generated co...

Spatial generalized linear mixed models are common in applied statistics. Most users are satisfied using a Gaussian distribution for the spatial latent variables in this model, but it is unclear whether the Gaussian assumption holds. Wrong Gaussian assumptions cause bias in parameter estimates and affect the accuracy of spatial predictions. Thus, there is a need for more flexible priors for the...

Nonlinear mixed-effects (NLME) models and generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) are popular in the analysis of longitudinal data and clustered data. Covariates are often introduced to partially explain the large between individual (cluster) variation. Many of these covariates, however, contain missing data and/or are measured with errors [1]. In these cases, likelihood inference can be computa...

The femR315 gene was recently identified by Tn551 insertional mutagenesis as one of the new auxiliary genes, the alteration of which resulted in a drastically reduced methicillin resistance of the Staphylococcus aureus strain COL. femR315 (also known as femD) theoretically encoded a protein of 451 amino acids showing significant amino acid sequence homology with phosphoglucomutases and similar ...

Psycholinguistic data are often analyzed with repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVA), but this paper argues that mixed-effects (multilevel) models provide a better alternative method. First, models are discussed in which the two random factors of participants and items are crossed, and not nested. Traditional ANOVAs are compared against these crossed mixed-effects models, for simulated ...

Social network analysis (SNA) has recently emerged as a fundamental tool to study animal behavior. While many studies have analyzed the relationship between environmental factors and behavior across large, complex populations, few focused on species living in small groups due limitations of statistical methods currently employed. Some difficulties are often comparing social structure different ...