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...

One difficulty in regression analysis for longitudinal data is that the outcomes are oftenmissing in a non-ignorable way (Little & Rubin, 1987). Likelihood based approaches todeal with non-ignorable missing outcomes can be divided into selection models and patternmixture models based on the way...

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...

Gray's extension of Cox's proportional hazards (PH) model for right-censored survival data allows for a departure from the PH assumption via introduction of time-varying regression coefficients (TVC) using penalized splines. Gray's work focused on estimation, inference and residual analyses, but...

The Generalized Additive model (GAM) has been used as a standard tool for epidemiologic analysis exploring the effect of air pollution on population health during the last decade as it allows nonparametric relationships between the independent predictors and response. One major concern to the...

Generalized additive model (GAM) with natural cubic splines (NS) has been commonly used as a standard analytical tool in time series studies of health effects of air pollution. Standard model selection procedures used in GAM ignore the uncertainty in model fitting. This may lead to biased...

Many research areas require multiple outcomes. For example, neuropsychological hypotheses may not be testable using a single measure. Similarly, genetic researchers frequently examine multiple markers across the genome. Examining multiple hypotheses requires the use of multiple testing...