Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Impacts Of Cold Weather On Health In Texas, Tsun-Hsuan Chen

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Recent events with recorded low temperature and unusual snow accumulation in the United States and Europe have raised the public awareness of the potential health impacts of extreme winter weather. Excessive cold was the leading cause of weather-related death during 2006-2010 in the U.S., accounting for 63% of weather related deaths. Several studies worldwide have demonstrated that, in general, mortality rates are higher in winter compared to summer. Studies have also shown that the association between cold temperature and death vary across cities, regions and countries and is especially relevant with decreasing latitude or in regions with mild winter climate. …

Censored Count Data Analysis – Statistical Techniques And Applications, Xiao Yu

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Count data are commonly used to report frequency statistics of diverse health outcomes. However, some data are marked intentionally to avoid leaking information that could be used to identify individuals when population sizes are small. The situation hinders the further use from those data in public health research. Thus, an accurate and efficient method for dealing with censored count data is needed.

We developed Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation algorithm to censored Poisson regression model to deal with censored count data and improve the computational efficiency. In addition, we applied three methods to deal with censored count data: 1) multiple imputation …