Search results for "Segmented regression"
showing 10 items of 28 documents
Reference growth charts for Posidonia oceanica seagrass: An effective tool for assessing growth performance by age and depth
2016
Abstract Growth performance of rhizomes has become among the most used descriptors for monitoring Posidonia oceanica seagrass dynamics and population status. However, ability to detect any change of growth in space or in time is often confounded by natural age-induced decline. To overcome this problem, we have produced reference growth charts, which in other areas are universally recognized as a very powerful tool for comparing growth of living beings during their ontogeny. Reference growth charts involving different P. oceanica growth performance measures (speed of growth and primary production of rhizomes) have been built using proper statistical frameworks (GLMM, Segmented and Quantile R…
Heterogeneous Indicators of Cognitive Performance and Performance Variability Across the Lifespan
2020
Reaction time (RT) and RT variability are core components of cognitive performance that can be captured through brief and easy-to-administer tasks of simple RT and choice RT. The current study aims to describe age-related differences in cognitive performance, toward better characterizing normative performance across the lifespan. We examined mean and variability of response times on a simple RT and choice RT tasks in a large and diverse web-based sample (10,060 visitors to TestMyBrain.org). We also examined lifespan-related differences in response time variability using multiple different approaches (raw variability, mean scaled variability, and mean residualized variability). These analyse…
Modelling the non-linear multiple-lag effects of ambient temperature on mortality in Santiago and Palermo: a constrained segmented distributed lag ap…
2008
Objectives: Exposure to ambient temperature can affect mortality levels for days or weeks following exposure, making modelling such effects in regression analysis of daily time-series data complex. Methods: We propose a new approach involving a multi-lag segmented approximation to account for the non-linear effect of temperature and the use of two different penalised spline bases to model the distributed lag of both heat and cold exposure. Compared with standard splines, the novel penalised framework is more flexible at short lags where change in coefficients is greatest, and selection of the maximum lag appears substantially less important in determining the overall pattern of the effect. …
Animal Perception of Seasonal Thresholds: Changes in Elephant Movement in Relation to Rainfall Patterns
2012
Background The identification of temporal thresholds or shifts in animal movement informs ecologists of changes in an animal’s behaviour, which contributes to an understanding of species’ responses in different environments. In African savannas, rainfall, temperature and primary productivity influence the movements of large herbivores and drive changes at different scales. Here, we developed a novel approach to define seasonal shifts in movement behaviour by examining the movements of a highly mobile herbivore (elephant; Loxodonta africana), in relation to local and regional rainfall patterns. Methodology/Principal Findings We used speed to determine movement changes of between 8 and 14 GPS…
An analysis of Italian university students' performance through segmented regression models: gender differences in STEM courses
2021
AbstractThis paper investigates gender differences in university performances in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses in Italy, proposing a novel application through the segmented regression models. The analysis concerns freshmen students enrolled at a 3-year STEM degree in Italian universities in the last decade, with a focus on the relationship between the number of university credits earned during the first year (a good predictor of the regularity of the career) and the probability of getting the bachelor degree within 4 years. Data is provided by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR). Our analysis confirms that first-year performance is strong…
Estimating the Number of Changepoints in Segmented Regression Models: Comparative Study and Application
2020
This paper deals with the problem of selecting the number of changepoints in segmented regression models. The aim is to review selection criteria, namely information criteria and hypothesis testing, and to propose a novel application in the context of students' careers in higher education. The performance of the selection criteria is assessed through simulation studies. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between University students' performance and one of its main determinants, finding out that this relationship is actually broken-line.
A novel sequential testing procedure for selecting the number of changepoints in segmented regression models
2023
In this work, we address the problem of selecting the number of changepoints in segmented regression models. We propose a novel stepwise procedure and assess its performance through simulation studies. We demonstrate that our proposal behaves well with the Gaussian and Binomial responses.
Modelling of Reflectance Spectra of Skin Phototypes III
2011
In dermatology, study of human skin colour is related to skin phototype (SPT) in which the Fitzpatrick's scale is the most used skin photo type classification. Assessment of skin response to UV for various reasons plays an important role in dermatology. This is however not easy to be performed because of two reasons. Firstly, skin areas may have different skin tone resulting in different reflectance spectra and secondly, different modalities may produce different reflectance spectra. We hypothesize that the underlying pattern of reflectance spectra must be similar regardless of the modalities use and the skin areas where it is obtained, for a particular person. An observational clinical stu…
Sensitivity of extreme rainfall to temperature in semi-arid Mediterranean regions
2019
Abstract Warmer air has the potential to hold more water vapour and, therefore, to provide more water to rainfall events. Studying the relationship between rainfall and temperature represents an emerging issue in hydrology and meteorology, since it can be considered fundamental for evaluating the effects of global warming on future precipitation. Various approaches have been tested across different parts of the world, in many cases observing an intensification of extreme precipitation at higher temperatures consistent with the well-known thermodynamic Clausius-Clapeyron relation (CC-scaling rate of 6–7%°C−1). However, at different locations for hourly time-scales, the temperature-extreme ra…
Permutation Tests in Linear Regression
2015
Exact permutation tests are available only in rather simple linear models. The problem is that, although standard assumptions allow permuting the errors of the model, we cannot permute them in practice, because they are unobservable. Nevertheless, the residuals of the model can be permuted. A proof is given here which shows that it is possible to approximate the unobservable permutation distribution where the true errors are permuted by permuting the residuals. It is shown that approximation holds asymptotically and almost surely for certain quadratic statistics as well as for statistics which are expressible as the maximum of appropriate linear functions. The result is applied to testing t…