Probability Commons^™

Modeling And Efficient Estimation Of Intra-Family Correlations, Roy Sabo

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

Familial data occur when observations are taken on multiple members of the same family. Due to relationships between these members, both genetic and by cohabitation, their response variables will likely exhibit some form of dependence. Most of the existing literature models this dependence with an equicorrelated structure. This structure is appropriate when the dependencies between family members are similar, such as in genetic studies, but not in cases where we expect the dependencies to differ, such as behavioral comparisons across different age groups. In this dissertation we first discuss an alternative structure based upon first-order autoregressive correlation. Specifically we create …