Statistical Methodology Commons^™

Statistical Methodology To Establish A Benchmark For Evaluating Antimicrobial Resistance Genes Through Real Time Pcr Assay, Enakshy Dutta

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Work

Novel diagnostic tests are usually compared with gold standard tests for evaluating diagnostic accuracy. For assessing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to bovine respiratory disease (BRD) pathogens, phenotypic broth microdilution method is used as gold standard (GS). The objective of the thesis is to evaluate the optimal cycle threshold (Ct) generated by real-time polymerase chain reaction (rtPCR) to genes that confer resistance that will translate to the phenotypic classification of AMR. Data from two different methodologies are assessed to identify Ct that will discriminate between resistance (R) and susceptibility (S). First, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine the …

Optimal Design For A Causal Structure, Zaher Kmail

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Work

Linear models and mixed models are important statistical tools. But in many natural phenomena, there is more than one endogenous variable involved and these variables are related in a sophisticated way. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is often used to model the complex relationships between the endogenous and exogenous variables. It was first implemented in research to estimate the strength and direction of direct and indirect effects among variables and to measure the relative magnitude of each causal factor.

Historically, traditional optimal design theory focuses on univariate linear, nonlinear, and mixed models. There is no current literature on the subject of …

Group Testing Regression Models, Boan Zhang

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Work

Group testing, where groups of individual specimens are composited to test for the presence or absence of a disease (or some other binary characteristic), is a procedure commonly used to reduce the costs of screening a large number of individuals. Statistical research in group testing has traditionally focused on a homogeneous population, where individuals are assumed to have the same probability of having a disease. However, individuals often have different risks of positivity, so recent research has examined regression models that allow for heterogeneity among individuals within the population. This dissertation focuses on two problems involving group testing regression models. …

A Comparison Of Spatial Prediction Techniques Using Both Hard And Soft Data, Megan L. Liedtke Tesar

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Work

The overall goal of this research, which is common to most spatial studies, is to predict a value of interest at an unsampled location based on measured values at nearby sampled locations. To accomplish this goal, ordinary kriging can be used to obtain the best linear unbiased predictor. However, there is often a large amount of variability surrounding the measurements of environmental variables, and traditional prediction methods, such as ordinary kriging, do not account for an attribute with more than one level of uncertainty. This dissertation addresses this limitation by introducing a new methodology called weighted kriging. This prediction technique …

Fully Exponential Laplace Approximation Em Algorithm For Nonlinear Mixed Effects Models, Meijian Zhou

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Work

Nonlinear mixed effects models provide a flexible and powerful platform for the analysis of clustered data that arise in numerous fields, such as pharmacology, biology, agriculture, forestry, and economics. This dissertation focuses on fitting parametric nonlinear mixed effects models with single- and multi-level random effects. A new, efficient, and accurate method that gives an error of order O(1/n²), fully exponential Laplace approximation EM algorithm (FELA-EM), for obtaining restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates in nonlinear mixed effects models is developed. Sample codes for implementing FELA-EM algorithm in R are given. Simulation studies have been conducted to evaluate …