Exchangeable copulas are used to model an extra-binomial variation in Bernoulli experiments with a variable number of trials. Maximum likelihood inference procedures for the intra-cluster correlation are constructed for several copula families. The selection of a particular model is carried out...

The class of composite likelihood functions provides a flexible and powerful toolkit to carry out approximate inference for complex statistical models when the full likelihood is either impossible to specify or unfeasible to compute. However, the strength of the composite likelihood approach is...

Substantial research has been devoted to developing methodology for inferring the association of clustered failure time data. However, in the study of familial disease, there may be a proportion of patients cured or nonsusceptible to the disease. Thus, it is necessary to simultaneously consider...

Pairwise maximum likelihood (PML) estimation method is developed for factor analysis models with ordinal data and fitted both in an exploratory and confirmatory set-up. The performance of the method is studied via simulations and comparisons with full information maximum likelihood (FIML) and...

In the context of multilevel longitudinal data, where sample units are collected in clusters, an important aspect that should be accounted for is the unobserved heterogeneity between sample units and between clusters. For this aim we propose an approach based on nested hidden (latent) Markov...

This article concerns parameter estimation for general state space models, following a frequentist likelihood-based approach. Since exact methods for computing and maximizing the likelihood function are usually not feasible, approximate solutions, based on Monte Carlo or numerical methods, have...

Abstract A common goal of epidemiologic research is to study the association between a certain exposure and a certain outcome, while controlling for important covariates. This is often done by fitting a restricted mean model for the outcome, as in generalized linear models (GLMs) and in...

In this thesis, we propose to analyze panel count data using a spline-basedsieve generalized estimating equation method with a semiparametric proportional mean model E(N(t)|Z) = Λ0(t) eβT0Z. The natural log of the baseline mean function, logΛ0(t), is approximated by a monotone cubic B-spline...