On the basis of serological data from prevalence studies of rubella, mumps and hepatitis A, the paper describes a flexible local maximum likelihood method for the estimation of the rate at which susceptible individuals acquire infection at different ages. In contrast with parametric models that...

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...

Based on sero-prevalence data of rubella, mumps in the UK and varicella in Belgium, we show how the force of infection, the age-specific rate at which susceptible individuals contract infection, can be estimated using generalized linear mixed models (McCulloch & Searle, 2001). Modelling the...

In the conventional linear mixed-effects model, four structures can be distinguished: fixed effects, random effects, measurement error and serial correlation. The latter captures the phenomenon that the correlation structure within a subject depends on the time lag between two measurements....