Introduction frailty is an increased vulnerability to adverse health outcomes, across multiple physiological systems, with both environmental and genetic drivers. The two most commonly used measures are Rockwood's frailty index (FI) and Fried's frailty phenotype (FP). Material and methods the present study included 3626 individuals from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry. We used the classical t...

A Poisson-gamma model is introduced to account for between-subjects heterogeneity and within-subjects serial correlation occurring in longitudinal count data. The model extends the usual time-constant shared frailty approach to allow time-varying serially correlated gamma frailty whilst retaining standard marginal assumptions. A composite likelihood approach to estimation and testing for serial...

BACKGROUND There is no single generally accepted clinical definition of frailty. Previously developed tools to assess frailty that have been shown to be predictive of death or need for entry into an institutional facility have not gained acceptance among practising clinicians. We aimed to develop a tool that would be both predictive and easy to use. METHODS We developed the 7-point Clinical F...

A very general mechanism for penalized regression has been added to the coxph function in S Plus A user written S Plus function can be supplied that gives addi tional term s to the partial likelihood along with the rst and second derivatives of those terms The variance and degrees of freedom for the extended model are then computed as outlined in Gray Several other arguments control optional as...

Frailty models account for the clustering present in event time data. A proportional hazards model with shared frailties expresses the hazard for each subject. Often a one-parameter gamma distribution is assumed for the frailties. In this paper, we construct formal goodness-of-fit tests to test for gamma frailties. We construct a new class of frailty models that extend the gamma frailty model b...

Due to natural or artificial clustering, multivariate survival data often arise in biomedical studies, for example, a dental study involving multiple teeth from each subject. A certain proportion of subjects in the population who are not expected to experience the event of interest are considered to be "cured" or insusceptible. To model correlated or clustered failure time data incorporating a ...

Data of the Danish Twin Registry on monozygotic and dizygotic twins are used to analyse genetic and environmental influences on susceptibility to heart diseases for males and females, respectively. The sample includes 7955 like-sexed twin pairs born between 1870 and 1930. Follow-up was from 1 January 1943 to 31 December 1993 which results in truncation (twin pairs were included in the study if ...

A fundamental task is machine learning is modeling the relationship between different observation spaces. Dimensionality reduction is the task reducing the number of dimensions in a parameterization of a data-set. In this thesis we are interested in the cross-road between these two tasks: shared dimensionality reduction. Shared dimensionality reduction aims to represent multiple observation spa...