Breast cancer is one of the diseases with the most profound impact on health in developed countries and mammography is the most popular method for detecting breast cancer at a very early stage. This paper focuses on the waiting period from a positive mammogram until a confirmatory diagnosis is...

Generalized linear mixed models or multilevel regression models have become increasingly popular. Several methods have been proposed for estimating such models. However,to date there is no single method that can be assumed to work well in all circumstances in terms of both parameter recovery and...

Based on sero-prevalence data of rubella, mumps in the UK and varicella in Belgium, we show how the force of infection, the age-specific rate at which susceptible individuals contract infection, can be estimated using generalized linear mixed models (McCulloch & Searle, 2001). Modelling the...

In this article, the authors suggest a profile-likelihood approach for estimating complex models by maximum likelihood (ML) using standard software and minimal programming. The method works whenever setting some of the parameters of the model to known constants turns the model into a standard...

Measuring teacher effectiveness is challenging since no direct estimate exists; teacher effectiveness can be measured only indirectly through student responses. Traditional value-added assessment (VAA) models generally attempt to estimate the value that an individual teacher adds to students'...

In a Poisson regression model in which observations are either clustered or represented by repeated measurements of counts, the number of observed zero counts is sometimes greater than the expected frequency by the Poisson distribution and overdispersion may remain even after modeling excess...

Nonlinear mixed-effects (NLME) models and generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) are popular in the analyses of longitudinal data and clustered data. Covariates are often introduced to partially explain the large between individual (cluster) variation. Many of these covariates, however, contain...

Standard annuities are offered at one price to all individuals of the same age and gender. Individual mortality heterogeneity exposes insurers to adverse selection since only relatively healthy lives are expected to purchase annuities. As a result standard annuities are priced assuming...