Understanding causes of hospital closure is important if hospitals are to survive and continue to fulfill their missions as the center for health care in their neighborhoods. Knowing which hospitals are most susceptible to closure can be of great use for hospital administrators and others...

The restricted maximum likelihood (REML) procedure is useful for inferences about variance components in linear mixed models (LMMs). However, its extension to nonlinear mixed models (NLMMs) is often hampered by analytically intractable integrals. For NLMMs various estimation methods have been...

When possible values of a response variable are limited, distributional assumptions about random effects may not be checkable. This may cause a distribution-robust estimator, such as the conditional maximum likelihood estimator to be recommended; however, it does not utilize all the information in...

Hierarchical likelihood provides a statistically efficient procedure for frailty models. Recently, a method using the computationally attractive orthodox best linear unbiased predictor has been proposed; this uses Pearson-type estimation. We compare both approaches and discuss their relative...

A wavelet method is proposed for recovering damaged images. The proposed method combines wavelet shrinkage with preprocessing based on a binning process and an imputation procedure that is designed to extend the scope of wavelet shrinkage to data with missing values and perturbed locations. The...

Evidence of communication traffic complexity reveals correlation in a within-queue and heterogeneity among queues. We show how a random-effect model can be used to accommodate these kinds of phenomena. We apply a Pareto distribution for arrival (service) time of individual queue for given...