Linkage and association analysis are both tools for mapping the locations of genes responsible for human traits. A common approach for quantitative trait linkage analysis in human pedigrees involves the use of variance component models. In the first part of this dissertation, I extended the...

The problem considered is sequential estimation of the mean θ of a one-parameter exponential family of distributions with squared error loss for estimation error and a cost c 0 for each of an i.i.d. sequence of potential observations X 1 , X 2 ,...A Bayesian approach is adopted, and natural...

This dissertation considers several modeling problems involvingclustered longitudinal data. Interest focuses on the associationstructure rather than the means and, in particular, on its change overtime. Concentration on this non-stationary, or ``dynamic'' aspect of theassociation structure is...

In this paper we review some applications of the path integral methodology of quantum mechanics to financial modeling and options pricing. A path integral is defined as a limit of the sequence of finite-dimensional integrals, in a much the same way as the Riemannian integral is defined as a...

In order to construct fixed-width (2d) confidence intervals for the mean of an unknown distribution function F , a new purely sequential sampling strategy is proposed first. The approach is quite different from the more traditional methodology of Chow and Robbins (1965, Ann. Math. Statist. , 36...

Most national health surveys do not permit precise measurement of the health of racial/ethnic subgroups that comprise 1 per cent of the U.S. population. We identify three potentially promising sample design strategies for increasing the accuracy of national health estimates for a small target...

We examine several variance estimators for cumulative incidence estimators that have been proposed over time, some of which are derived from asymptotic martingale or counting process theory, and some of which are developed from the moments of the multinomial distribution. There is little...

The cause for the observed trends in prostate cancer mortality is unclear. Several authors have indicated that incorrectly classified causes of death have played a role in recent mortality trends. This dissertation is devoted to analyzing competing risks survival data with a misclassified cause...

The Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) is the predominant tool to search for genetic risk variants that contribute to complex human disease. Despite the large number of GWAS findings, variants implicated by GWAS are themselves unlikely to fully explain the heritability of many diseases. In...

In the analysis of bivariate correlated failure time data, it is important to measure the strength of association among the correlated failure times. One commonly used measure is the cross-ratio. In the literature, the functional form of cross-ratio is rather restrictive, often assumed to be...