Since 1976, the United States has seen over 1,400 judicial executions, and these have been highly concentrated in only a few states and counties. The number of executions across counties appears to fit a stretched distribution. These distributions are typically reflective of self-reinforcing processes where the probability of observing an event increases for each previous event. To examine thes...

Frailty has been introduced as a group-wise random effect to describe the within-group dependence for correlated survival data. In this article, we propose a penalized joint likelihood method for nonparametric estimation of hazard function. With the proposed method, the frailty variance component and the smoothing parameters become the tuning parameters that are selected to minimize a loss func...

Multivariate recurrent event data are usually encountered in many clinical and longitudinal studies in which each study subject may experience multiple recurrent events. For the analysis of such data, most existing approaches have been proposed under the assumption that the censoring times are noninformative, which may not be true especially when the observation of recurrent events is terminate...

BACKGROUND Frailty is a state of vulnerability to poor resolution of homeostasis following a stressor event, such as chemotherapy or cancer surgery. Better knowledge of the epidemiology of frailty could help drive a global cancer care strategy for older people. The aim of this review was to establish the prevalence and outcomes of frailty and pre-frailty in older cancer patients. METHODS Obse...

Three correlated frailty models are used to analyze bivariate timeto-event data by assuming gamma, log-normal and compound Poisson distributed frailty. All approaches allow to deal with right censored lifetime data and account for heterogeneity as well as for a non-susceptible (cure) fraction in the study population. In the gamma and compound Poisson model traditional ML estimation methods are ...

A state/event model is a concurrent version of Mealy machines used for describing embedded reactive systems. This paper introduces a technique that uses compositionality and dependency analysis to significantly improve the efficiency of symbolic model checking of state/event models. It makes possible automated verification of large industrial designs with the use of only modest resources (less ...

Hormones and neurotransmitters are released when secretory granules or synaptic vesicles fuse with the cell membrane, a process denoted exocytosis. Modern imaging techniques, in particular total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, allow the investigator to monitor secretory granules at the plasma membrane before and when they undergo exocytosis. However, rigorous statistical app...

BACKGROUND Readmissions after hospital discharge are common and costly, but prediction models are poor at identifying patients at high risk of readmission. We evaluated the impact of frailty on readmission or death within 30 days after discharge from general internal medicine wards. METHODS We prospectively enrolled patients discharged from 7 medical wards at 2 teaching hospitals in Edmonton....

Individuals may experience more than one type of recurrent event and a terminal event during the life course of a disease. Follow-up may be interrupted for several reasons, including the end of a study, or patients lost to follow-up, which are non informative censoring events. Death could also stop the follow-up, hence, it is considered as a dependent terminal event. We propose a multivariate f...

BACKGROUND Existing operational definitions of frailty are personnel-costly and time-consuming, resulting in estimates with a small sample size that cannot be generalized to the population level. The objectives were to develop a multimorbidity frailty index using Taiwan's claim database, and to understand its ability to predict adverse event. METHODS This is a retrospective cohort study. Subj...