In many maintenance treatment trials, patients are first enrolled into an open treatmentbefore they are randomized into treatment groups. During this period, patients are followedover time with their responses measured longitudinally. This design is very common intoday's public health studies of...

Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis is one of the most widely used methods for summarizing intrinsic properties of a diagnostic system, and is often used in evaluation and comparison of diagnostic technologies, practices or systems. These methods play an important role in public...

Tree-structured survival analysis (TSSA) is used to recursively detect covariate values that best divide the sample into subsequent subsets with respect to a time to event outcome. The result is a set of empirical classification groups, each of which identifies individuals with more homogeneous...

Missing problem is very common in today's public health studies because of responses measured longitudinally. In this dissertation we proposed two latent variable models for longitudinal data with informative missingness. In the first approach, a latent variable model is developed for the...