Despite improvements in global child health within the last three decades, under-5 mortality remains significantly high in Sub-Saharan and Asia. Both regions did not achieve the MDG target of reducing under-5 mortality by two thirds by 2015. The underlying causes of under-5 mortality differ...

Multiplicative random effects allow for cluster-specific scaling of covariate effects. In many applications with spatial clustering, however, the random effects additionally show some geographical pattern, which usually can not sufficiently be captured with existing estimation techniques....

Anthropometric indicators, in particular the height for a particular age, are found to be lowest in South Asia compared to other geopolitical regions. However, despite the close relationship between undernutrition and mortality rates, the highest mortality rates are concentrated in sub-Saharan...

Modeling real estate prices in the context of hedonic models often involves fitting a Generalized Additive Model, where only the mean of a (lognormal) distribution is regressed on a set of variables without taking other parameters of the distribution into account. Thus far, the application of...

The most widely used approaches in hedonic price modelling of real estate data and price index construction are Time Dummy and Imputation methods. Both methods, however, reveal extreme approaches regarding regression modeling of real estate data. In the time dummy approach, the data are pooled...

We discuss inference for additive models with random scaling factors. The additive effects are of the form (1+g)f(z) where f is a nonlinear function of the continuous covariate z modeled by P(enalized)-splines and 1+g is a random scaling factor. Additionally, monotonicity constraints on the...

Gaussian Structured Additive Regression provides a flexible framework for additive decomposition of the expected value with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster-specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity, and complex interactions between covariates of different types....

We discuss inference for additive models with random scaling factors. The additive effects are of the form (1+g)f(z) where f is a nonlinear function of the continuous covariate z modeled by P(enalized)-splines and 1+g is a random scaling factor. Additionally, monotonicity constraints on the...