Organizing a graduate program in statistics and data science raises many questions, offering a variety of opportunities while presenting a multitude of choices. The call for graduate programs in statistics and data science is overwhelming. How does it align with other (future) study programs at...

In this review, we give a general overview of latent variable models. We introduce the general model and discuss various inferential approaches. Afterward, we present several commonly applied special cases, including mixture or latent class models, as well as mixed models. We apply many of these...

Studies in epidemiology and social sciences are often longitudinal and outcome measures are frequently obtained by questionnaires in ordinal scales. To understand the relationship between explanatory variables and outcome measures, generalized estimating equations can be applied to provide a...

The confounding of selection and measurement effects between different modes is a disadvantage of mixed-mode surveys. Solutions to this problem have been suggested in several studies. Most use adjusting covariates to control selection effects. Unfortunately, these covariates must meet strong...

In sets of count data, the sample variance is often considerably larger or smaller than the sample mean, known as a problem of over- or underdispersion. The focus is on hierarchical Bayesian modeling of such longitudinal count data. Two different models are considered. The first one assumes a...

A mixed effects least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifier is introduced to extend the standard LS-SVM classifier for handling longitudinal data. The mixed effects LS-SVM model contains a random intercept and allows to classify highly unbalanced data, in the sense that there is an...

Overdispersion and correlation are two features often encountered when modeling non-Gaussian dependent data, usually as a function of known covariates. Methods that ignore the presence of these phenomena are often in jeopardy of leading to biased assessment of covariate effects. The...

Missing data often occur in regression analysis. Imputation, weighting, direct likelihood, and Bayesian inference are typical approaches for missing data analysis. The focus is on missing covariate data, a common complication in the analysis of sample surveys and clinical trials. A key quantity...