Principal components are a well established tool in dimension reduction. The extension to principal curves allows for general smooth curves which pass through the middle of a p-dimensional data cloud. In this paper local principal curves are introduced, which are based on the localization of...

Common approaches to monotonic regression focus on the case of a unidimensional covariate and continuous dependent variable. Here a general approach is proposed that allows for additive and multiplicative structures where one or more variables have monotone influence on the dependent variable....

We describe a stochastic model based on a branching process for analyzing surveillance data of infectious diseases that allows to make forecasts of the future development of the epidemic. The model is based on a Poisson branching process with immigration with additional adjustment for possible...

Functional data analysis can be challenging when the functional objects are sampled only very sparsely and unevenly. Most approaches rely on smoothing to recover the underlying functional object from the data which can be difficult if the data is irregularly distributed. In this paper we present...

In additive models the problem of variable selection is strongly linked to the choice of the amount of smoothing used for components that represent metrical variables. Many software packages use separate toolsto solve the different tasks of variable selection and smoothing parameter choice. The...

In many applications it is known that the underlying smooth function is constrained to have a specific form. In the present paper, we propose an estimation method based on the regression spline approach, which allows to include concavity or convexity constraints in an appealing way. Instead of...

We propose a novel method to model nonlinear regression problems by adapting the principle of penalization to Partial Least Squares (PLS). Starting with a generalized additive model, we expand the additive component of each variable in terms of a generous amount of B-Splines basis functions. In...

In recent years the introduction of aggregation methods led to many new techniques within the field of prediction and classification. The most important developments, bagging and boosting, habe been extensively analyzed for two and multi class problems. While the proposed methods treat the class...

A new regularization method for regression models is proposed. The criterion to be minimized contains a penalty term which explicitly links strength of penalization to the correlation between predictors. As the elastic net, the method encourages a grouping effect where strongly correlated...

Emerging patterns represent a class of interaction structures which has been recently proposed as a tool in data mining. In this paper, a new and more general definition refering to underlying probabilities is proposed. The defined interaction patterns carry information about the relevance of...