Search results for "bayesian"

Probabilistic small area risk assessment using GIS-based data: a case study on Finnish childhood diabetes

2000

A Bayesian hierarchical spatial model is constructed to describe the regional incidence of insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) among the under 15-year-olds in Finland. The model exploits aggregated pixel-wise locations for both the cases and the population at risk. Typically such data arise from combining geographic information systems (GIS) with large databases. The dates of diagnosis and locations of the cases are observed from 1987 to 1996. The population at risk counts are available for every second year during the same period. A hierarchical model is suggested for the pixel wise case counts, including a population model to account for the uncertainty of the population at risk ov…

A Bayesian analysis of a queueing system with unlimited service

1997

Abstract A queueing system occurs when “customers” arrive at some facility requiring a certain type of “service” provided by the “servers”. Both the arrival pattern and the service requirements are usually taken to be random. If all the servers are busy when customers arrive, they usually wait in line to get served. Queues possess a number of mathematical challenges and have been mainly approached from a probability point of view, and statistical analysis are very scarce. In this paper we present a Bayesian analysis of a Markovian queue in which customers are immediately served upon arrival, and hence no waiting lines form. Emergency and self-service facilities provide many examples. Techni…

Fully Bayesian Approach to Image Restoration with an Application in Biogeography

1994

SUMMARY A common method of studying biogeographical ranges is an atlas survey, in which the research area is divided into a square grid and the data consist of the squares where observations occur. Often the observations form only an incomplete map of the true range, and a method is required to decide whether the blank squares indicate true absence or merely a lack of study there. This is essentially an image restoration problem, but it has properties that make the common empirical Bayesian procedures inadequate. Most notably, the observed image is heavily degraded, causing difficulties in the estimation of spatial interaction, and the assessment of reliability of the restoration is emphasi…

Distribucion final de referencia para el problema de Fieller-Creasy

1982

The problem of making inferences about the ratio of two normal populations is usually known as the Fieller-Creasy problem, and it gave rise to a controversy among fiducialists and confidence-intervalists. A Bayesian solution to such a problem when the two normal populations have the same unknown variance was presented by Bernardo (1977) using reference non-informative prior distributions. The solution to the case in which the variances are not assumed equal is obtained here. Some numerical results for artificial populations are given

Bayesian Design of “Successful” Replications

2002

Replication of experiments is commonin applied research. However, systematic studies of the goals and motivations of a “replication” are rare. As a consequence, there does not seem to be a precise notion of what a “success” when replicating means. This article discusses some of the possible goals for replication; this leads to different (but precise) notions of “success” when replicating. Bayesian hierarchical models allow for a flexible and explicit incorporation of the assumed relationship among the experiments. Bayesian predictive distributions are a natural tool to compute the probability of the replication being successful, and hence to design the replication so that the probability of…

A Bayesian SIRS model for the analysis of respiratory syncytial virus in the region of Valencia, Spain

2014

We present a Bayesian stochastic susceptible-infected-recovered-susceptible (SIRS) model in discrete time to understand respiratory syncytial virus dynamics in the region of Valencia, Spain. A SIRS model based on ordinary differential equations has also been proposed to describe RSV dynamics in the region of Valencia. However, this continuous-time deterministic model is not suitable when the initial number of infected individuals is small. Stochastic epidemic models based on a probability of disease transmission provide a more natural description of the spread of infectious diseases. In addition, by allowing the transmission rate to vary stochastically over time, the proposed model provides…

Reference Posterior Distributions for Bayesian Inference

1979

Bayesian measures of surprise for outlier detection

2003

From a Bayesian point of view, testing whether an observation is an outlier is usually reduced to a testing problem concerning a parameter of a contaminating distribution. This requires elicitation of both (i) the contaminating distribution that generates the outlier and (ii) prior distributions on its parameters. However, very little information is typically available about how the possible outlier could have been generated. Thus easy, preliminary checks in which these assessments can often be avoided may prove useful. Several such measures of surprise are derived for outlier detection in normal models. Results are applied to several examples. Default Bayes factors, where the contaminating…

A Bayesian comparison of cluster, strata, and random samples

1999

When sampling from finite populations, simple random sampling (SRS) is rarely used in practice, due to either high cost or information to be gained from more efficient designs. Bayesian hierarchical models are a natural framework to model the non-randomness in the sample. This paper concentrates on the effects that the design has on inference about characteristics of the finite population, and makes a critical comparison among some common designs.

On implementation of the Gibbs sampler for estimating the accuracy of multiple diagnostic tests

2010

Implementation of the Gibbs sampler for estimating the accuracy of multiple binary diagnostic tests in one population has been investigated. This method, proposed by Joseph, Gyorkos and Coupal, makes use of a Bayesian approach and is used in the absence of a gold standard to estimate the prevalence, the sensitivity and specificity of medical diagnostic tests. The expressions that allow this method to be implemented for an arbitrary number of tests are given. By using the convergence diagnostics procedure of Raftery and Lewis, the relation between the number of iterations of Gibbs sampling and the precision of the estimated quantiles of the posterior distributions is derived. An example conc…