This paper is concerned with the situation that occurs in claims reserving when there are negative values in the development triangle of incremental claim amounts. Typically these negative values will be the result of salvage recoveries, payments from third parties, total or partial cancellation of outstanding claims due to initial overestimation of the loss or to a possible favorable jury deci...

Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques have revolutionized the field of Bayesian statistics. Their enormous power and their generalizability have rendered them the method of choice for statistical inference in many scientific disciplines. Their power is so great that they can even accommodate situations in which the structure of the statistical model itself is uncertain. However, the analysis of s...

Modern statistical models and computational methods can now incorporate uncertainty of the parameters used in Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessments (QMRA). Many QMRAs use Monte Carlo methods, but work from fixed estimates for means, variances and other parameters. We illustrate the ease of estimating all parameters contemporaneously with the risk assessment, incorporating all the parameter un...

BACKGROUND Decisions about the use of new technologies in health care are often based on complex economic models. Decision makers frequently make informal judgments about evidence, uncertainty, and the assumptions that underpin these models. OBJECTIVES Transparent interactive decision interrogator (TIDI) facilitates more formal critique of decision models by decision makers such as members of...

We present an alternative to the contrast-based parameterization used in a number of publications for network meta-analysis. This alternative "arm-based" parameterization offers a number of advantages: it allows for a "long" normalized data structure that remains constant regardless of the number of comparators; it can be used to directly incorporate individual patient data into the analysis; t...

Several diseases have common risk factors. The joint modeling of disease outcomes within a spatial statistical context may provide more insight on the interaction of diseases both at individual and at regional level. Spatial joint modeling allows for studying of the relationship between diseases and also between regions under study. One major approach for joint spatial modeling is the multivari...

background : the restriction in resources of health services renders the prioritization of the distribution of these resources necessary. the health care need index is used to investigate equality in distribution of health services. the main aim of the current study was to estimate this index for skin cancer in iran by involving the effect of adjacent regions. methods: the present study was a c...