An important problem in epidemiology and medical research is the estimation of a causal effect of a treatment action at a single point in time on the mean of an outcome within a population defined by strata of some of the observed covariates. Marginal structural models (MSM) are models for...

In van der Laan and Dudoit (2003) we propose and theoretically study a unified loss function based statistical methodology, which provides a road map for estimation and performance assessment. Given a parameter of interest which can be described as the minimizer of the population mean of a loss...

Multiple transcription factors coordinately control transcriptional regulation of genes in eukaryotes. Although multiple computational methods consider the identification of individual transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), very few focus on the interactions between these sites. We consider...

In a recent article in PLoS Genetics, Bock et al., (2006) undertake an extensive computational epigenetics analysis of the ability of DNA sequence-derived features, capturing attributes such as tetramer frequencies, repeats and predicted structure, to predict the methylation status of CpG...

When trying to learn a model for the prediction of an outcome given a set of covariates, a statistician has many estimation procedures in their toolbox. A few examples of these candidate learners are: least squares, least angle regression, random forests, and spline regression. Previous articles...

van der Laan and Dudoit (2003) provide a road map for estimation and performance assessment where a parameter of interest is defined as the risk minimizer for a suitable loss function and candidate estimators are generated using a loss function. After briefly reviewing this approach, this...

Various discriminant methods have been applied for classification of tumors based on gene expression profiles, among which the nearest neighbor (NN) method has been reported to perform relatively well. Usually cross-validation (CV) is used to select the neighbor size as well as the number of...

Suppose one observes a sample of independent and identically distributed observations from a particular data generating distribution. Suppose that one is concerned with estimation of a particular pathwise differentiable Euclidean parameter. A substitution estimator evaluating the parameter of a...