Search results for " Inference"
showing 10 items of 337 documents
Olley–Pakes productivity decomposition: computation and inference
2016
Summary We show how a moment-based estimation procedure can be used to compute point estimates and standard errors for the two components of the widely used Olley–Pakes decomposition of aggregate (weighted average) productivity. When applied to business level microdata, the procedure allows for autocovariance and heteroscedasticity robust inference and hypothesis testing about, for example, the coevolution of the productivity components in different groups of firms. We provide an application to Finnish firm level data and find that formal statistical inference casts doubt on the conclusions that one might draw on the basis of a visual inspection of the components of the decomposition.
Bayesian hierarchical Poisson models with a hidden Markov structure for the detection of influenza epidemic outbreaks
2015
Considerable effort has been devoted to the development of statistical algorithms for the automated monitoring of influenza surveillance data. In this article, we introduce a framework of models for the early detection of the onset of an influenza epidemic which is applicable to different kinds of surveillance data. In particular, the process of the observed cases is modelled via a Bayesian Hierarchical Poisson model in which the intensity parameter is a function of the incidence rate. The key point is to consider this incidence rate as a normal distribution in which both parameters (mean and variance) are modelled differently, depending on whether the system is in an epidemic or non-epide…
Bayesian Markov switching models for the early detection of influenza epidemics
2008
The early detection of outbreaks of diseases is one of the most challenging objectives of epidemiological surveillance systems. In this paper, a Markov switching model is introduced to determine the epidemic and non-epidemic periods from influenza surveillance data: the process of differenced incidence rates is modelled either with a first-order autoregressive process or with a Gaussian white-noise process depending on whether the system is in an epidemic or in a non-epidemic phase. The transition between phases of the disease is modelled as a Markovian process. Bayesian inference is carried out on the former model to detect influenza epidemics at the very moment of their onset. Moreover, t…
Bayesian survival analysis with BUGS
2020
Survival analysis is one of the most important fields of statistics in medicine and biological sciences. In addition, the computational advances in the last decades have favored the use of Bayesian methods in this context, providing a flexible and powerful alternative to the traditional frequentist approach. The objective of this article is to summarize some of the most popular Bayesian survival models, such as accelerated failure time, proportional hazards, mixture cure, competing risks, multi-state, frailty, and joint models of longitudinal and survival data. Moreover, an implementation of each presented model is provided using a BUGS syntax that can be run with JAGS from the R programmin…
Assessing uncertainty of voter transitions estimated from aggregated data. Application to the 2017 French presidential election
2020
[EN] Inferring electoral individual behaviour from aggregated data is a very active research area, with ramifications in sociology and political science. A new approach based on linear programming is proposed to estimate voter transitions among parties (or candidates) between two elections. Compared to other linear and quadratic programming models previously published, our approach presents two important innovations. Firstly, it explicitly deals with new entries and exits in the election census without assuming unrealistic hypotheses, enabling a reasonable estimation of vote behaviour of young electors voting for the first time. Secondly, by exploiting the information contained in the model…
Explaining German outward FDI in the EU: a reassessment using Bayesian model averaging and GLM estimators
2021
The last decades have seen an increasing interest in FDI and the process of production fragmentation. This has been particularly important for Germany as the core of the European Union (EU) production hub. This paper attempts to provide a deeper under standing of the drivers of German outward FDI in the EU for the period 1996–2012 by tackling the two main challenges faced in the modelization of FDI, namely the variable selection problem and the choice of the estimation method. For that purpose, we first extend previous BMA analysis developed by Camarero et al. (Econ Model 83:326–345, 2019) by including country-pair-fixed effects to select the appropriate set of variables. Second, we compare…
Extended differential geometric LARS for high-dimensional GLMs with general dispersion parameter
2018
A large class of modeling and prediction problems involves outcomes that belong to an exponential family distribution. Generalized linear models (GLMs) are a standard way of dealing with such situations. Even in high-dimensional feature spaces GLMs can be extended to deal with such situations. Penalized inference approaches, such as the $$\ell _1$$ or SCAD, or extensions of least angle regression, such as dgLARS, have been proposed to deal with GLMs with high-dimensional feature spaces. Although the theory underlying these methods is in principle generic, the implementation has remained restricted to dispersion-free models, such as the Poisson and logistic regression models. The aim of this…
Bayesian assessment of times to diagnosis in breast cancer screening
2008
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 carried out in hospital. Generalized linear mixed models are used to perform the statistical analysis, always within the Bayesian reasoning. Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are applied for estimation by simulating the posterior distribution of the parameters and hyperparameters of the model through the free software WinBUGS.
Intrinsic credible regions: An objective Bayesian approach to interval estimation
2005
This paper definesintrinsic credible regions, a method to produce objective Bayesian credible regions which only depends on the assumed model and the available data.Lowest posterior loss (LPL) regions are defined as Bayesian credible regions which contain values of minimum posterior expected loss: they depend both on the loss function and on the prior specification. An invariant, information-theory based loss function, theintrinsic discrepancy is argued to be appropriate for scientific communication. Intrinsic credible regions are the lowest posterior loss regions with respect to the intrinsic discrepancy loss and the appropriate reference prior. The proposed procedure is completely general…
Bayesian analysis of a disability model for lung cancer survival
2016
Bayesian reasoning, survival analysis and multi-state models are used to assess survival times for Stage IV non-small-cell lung cancer patients and the evolution of the disease over time. Bayesian estimation is done using minimum informative priors for the Weibull regression survival model, leading to an automatic inferential procedure. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have been used for approximating posterior distributions and the Bayesian information criterion has been considered for covariate selection. In particular, the posterior distribution of the transition probabilities, resulting from the multi-state model, constitutes a very interesting tool which could be useful to help oncolog…