This article provides an introductory step-by-step process to appraise an article on diagnosis. The authors introduce these principles using a systematic approach and case-based format. The process of assessing the validity of an article on diagnosis, determining its importance, and applying it to an individual patient is reviewed. The concepts of study population homogeneity, reference and cri...

Selecting the number of different classes which will be assumed to exist in the population is an important step in latent class analysis (LCA). The bootstrap likelihood ratio test (BLRT) provides a data-driven way to evaluate the relative adequacy of a (K -1)-class model compared to a K-class model. However, very little is known about how to predict the power or the required sample size for the...

Methods for detecting nucleotide substitution rates that are faster or slower than expected under neutral drift are widely used to identify candidate functional elements in genomic sequences. However, most existing methods consider either reductions (conservation) or increases (acceleration) in rate but not both, or assume that selection acts uniformly across the branches of a phylogeny. Here w...

Previous studies have looked at different factors that contribute to large truck-involved crashes, however a detailed analysis considering the specific effects of time of day is lacking. Using the Crash Records Information System (CRIS) database in Texas, large truck-involved crashes occurring on urban freeways between 2006 and 2010 were separated into five time periods (i.e., early morning, mo...

We investigate a fast optimization method for determining the minimizer of the negative Poisson likelihood function for the global analysis of fluorescence lifetime microscopy. Using the alternating optimization strategy, we iteratively solve a non-convex optimization problem to estimate the lifetime parameters and a convex optimization problem to estimate the concentration parameters. We effec...

A composite likelihood ratio test implemented in the program sweepfinder is a commonly used method for scanning a genome for recent selective sweeps. sweepfinder uses information on the spatial pattern (along the chromosome) of the site frequency spectrum around the selected locus. To avoid confounding effects of background selection and variation in the mutation process along the genome, the m...

The noncentral chi-square approximation of the distribution of the likelihood ratio (LR) test statistic is a critical part of the methodology in structural equation modeling. Recently, it was argued by some authors that in certain situations normal distributions may give a better approximation of the distribution of the LR test statistic. The main goal of this article is to evaluate the validit...

DNA barcoding as an approach for species identification is rapidly increasing in popularity. However, it remains unclear which statistical procedures should accompany the technique to provide a measure of uncertainty. Here we describe a likelihood ratio test which can be used to test if a sampled sequence is a member of an a priori specified species. We investigate the performance of the test u...

This paper considers settings where populations of units may experience recurrent events, termed failures for convenience, and where the units are subject to varying levels of usage. We provide joint models for the recurrent events and usage processes, which facilitate analysis of their relationship as well as prediction of failures. Data on usage are often incomplete and we show how to impleme...

The main purpose of this paper is to develop a Bayesian approach for the multisample factor analysis model with continuous and polytomous variables. Joint Bayesian estimates of the thresholds, the factor scores and the structural parameters subjected to some simple constraints across groups are obtained simultaneously. The Gibbs sampler is used to produce the joint Bayesian estimates. It is sho...