BACKGROUND Studies show that religion and spirituality are associated with decreased rates of mental illness. Some studies show decreased rates of suicide in religious populations, but the association between religion, spirituality and suicidal behaviors in people with mental illness are understudied. Few studies have examined the influence of social supports in these relationships. METHODS D...

This article is designed to understand the relationship between two approaches to the empirical analysis of social interactions. The first approach is the use of linear regressions to uncover social interactions. This approach estimates social interaction effects through changes in the conditional (linear) expectation of individual outcomes when group-level variables are included in the conditi...

Nonparametric estimation of a structural cointegrating regression model is studied. As in the standard linear cointegrating regression model, the regressor and the dependent variable are jointly dependent and contemporaneously correlated. In nonparametric estimation problems, joint dependence is known to be a major complication that affects identification, induces bias in conventional kernel es...

A large literature tests the structure-conduct-performance paradigm by regressions which use the profits-sales ratio as the dependent variable. That ratio is used because, under constant returns, it is generally supposed that profits/sales equals the Lerner measure of monopoly power. Profits/sales ratios are also used to make inferences about monopoly power for individual firms. This paper show...

In this paper we develop procedures for performing inference in regression models about how potential policy interventions affect the entire marginal distribution of an outcome of interest. These policy interventions consist of either changes in the distribution of covariates related to the outcome holding the conditional distribution of the outcome given covariates fixed, or changes in the con...

To investigate interactions between parasite species in a host, a population of field voles was studied longitudinally, with presence or absence of six different parasites measured repeatedly. Although trapping sessions were regular, a different set of voles was caught at each session, leading to incomplete profiles for all subjects. We use a discrete time hidden Markov model for each disease w...

The basal ganglia, in particular the striatum, are central to theories of behavioral control, and often identified as a seat of action selection. Reinforcement learning (RL) models--which have driven much recent experimental work on this region--cast striatum as a dynamic controller, integrating sensory and motivational information to construct efficient and enriching behavioral policies. Befit...

A mobile observer samples sequences of narrow-field projections of configurations in ambient space. The so-called structure-from-motion problem is to infer the structure of these spatial configurations from the sequence of projections. For rigid transformations, a unique metrical reconstruction is known to be possible from three orthographic views of four points. However, human observers seem a...

Despite its undeniable attractiveness as the only data protection mechanism with formal privacy guarantees, the concept of differential privacy has been repeatedly criticized because of the deteriorating effects of currently available differential privacy mechanisms. Due to the strong assumptions regarding the knowledge of a potential data intruder, the amount of noise that needs to be added to...

A semi-parametric spatial model for spatial dependence is proposed in Poisson regressions to study the effects of risk factors on incidence outcomes. The spatial model is constructed through an application of reproducing kernels. A Bayesian framework is proposed to infer the unknown parameters. Simulations are performed to compare the reproducing kernel-based method with several commonly used a...