We review three alternative approaches to modelling survey noncontact and refusal: multinomial, sequential and sample selection (bivariate probit) models. We then propose a multilevel extension of the sample selection model to allow for both interviewer effects and dependency between noncontact and refusal rates at the household and interviewer level. All methods are applied and compared in an ...

We analyze answers to household survey questions on whether household income has changed in the past twelve months, and on whether respondents expect their household income to change in the next twelve months. Both questions are answered on a five points scale. The data are an unbalanced panel of eleven consecutive annual waves. Using cross-tabulations of expected and realized changes, we first...

Despite a well-established correlation between alcohol intake and various risk-taking sexual behaviors, the causality remains unknown. I model the effect of alcohol use on the likelihood of pregnancy among youth using a variety of estimation techniques. The preference is given to the semi-parametric model where the cumulative distribution of heterogeneity is approximated by a 4-point discrete d...

OBJECTIVES Validate a retrospective venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk scoring method, which was developed at the University of Michigan Health System and based on the Caprini risk assessment model, and assess the confounding effects of VTE prophylaxis. BACKGROUND Assessing patients for risk of VTE is essential to initiating appropriate prophylaxis and reducing the mortality and morbidity asso...

We study the problem of identifying bat species from echolocation calls in order to build automated bioacoustic monitoring algorithms. We employ the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm which has been successfully applied for bird flight calls identification and show that classification performance is superior to hand crafted call shape parameters used in previous research. This highlights that gener...