The papers in this volume discuss important methodological advances in several important areas, including multivariate failure time data and interval censored data. The book will be an indispensable reference for researchers and practitioners in biostatistics, medical research, and the health sciences.

The papers in this volume discuss important methodological advances in several important areas, including multivariate failure time data and interval censored data. The book will be an indispensable reference for researchers and practitioners in biostatistics, medical research, and the health sciences.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Second Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics: Analysis of Correlated Data. The symposium was held in 2000 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine. It featured keynote lectures by Norman Breslow, David Cox and Ross Prentice and 16 invited presentations by other prominent researchers. The papers contained in this volume encompass recent methodological advances in several important areas, such as longitudinal data, multivariate failure time data and genetic data, as well as innovative applications of the existing theory and methods. This volume is a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the field of correlated data analysis.

Wavelet methods have become a widely spread tool in signal and image process ing tasks. This book deals with statistical applications, especially wavelet based smoothing. The methods described in this text are examples of non-linear and non parametric curve fitting. The book aims to contribute to the field both among statis ticians and in the application oriented world (including but not limited to signals and images). Although it also contains extensive analyses of some existing methods, it has no intention whatsoever to be a complete overview of the field: the text would show too much bias towards my own algorithms. I rather present new material and own insights in the questions involved with wavelet based noise reduction. On the other hand, the presented material does cover a whole range of methodologies, and in that sense, the book may serve as an introduction into the domain of wavelet smoothing. Throughout the text, three main properties show up ever again: sparsity, locality and multiresolution. Nearly all wavelet based methods exploit at least one of these properties in some or the other way. These notes present research results of the Belgian Programme on Interuniver sity Poles of Attraction, initiated by the Belgian State, Prime Minister's Office for Science, Technology and Culture. The scientific responsibility rests with me. My research was financed by a grant (1995 - 1999) from the Flemish Institute for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological Research in the Industry (IWT).

This work is devoted to several problems of parametric (mainly) and nonparametric estimation through the observation of Poisson processes defined on general spaces. Poisson processes are quite popular in applied research and therefore they attract the attention of many statisticians. There are a lot of good books on point processes and many of them contain chapters devoted to statistical inference for general and partic ular models of processes. There are even chapters on statistical estimation problems for inhomogeneous Poisson processes in asymptotic statements. Nevertheless it seems that the asymptotic theory of estimation for nonlinear models of Poisson processes needs some development. Here nonlinear means the models of inhomogeneous Pois son processes with intensity function nonlinearly depending on unknown parameters. In such situations the estimators usually cannot be written in exact form and are given as solutions of some equations. However the models can be quite fruitful in en gineering problems and the existing computing algorithms are sufficiently powerful to calculate these estimators. Therefore the properties of estimators can be interesting too.

A practical guide to analysing partially observeddata. Collecting, analysing and drawing inferences from data iscentral to research in the medical and social sciences.Unfortunately, it is rarely possible to collect all the intendeddata. The literature on inference from the resultingincomplete data is now huge, and continues to grow both asmethods are developed for large and complex data structures, and asincreasing computer power and suitable software enable researchersto apply these methods. This book focuses on a particular statistical method foranalysing and drawing inferences from incomplete data, calledMultiple Imputation (MI). MI is attractive because it is bothpractical and widely applicable. The authors aim is to clarify theissues raised by missing data, describing the rationale for MI, therelationship between the various imputation models and associatedalgorithms and its application to increasingly complex datastructures. Multiple Imputation and its Application: Discusses the issues raised by the analysis of partiallyobserved data, and the assumptions on which analyses rest. Presents a practical guide to the issues to consider whenanalysing incomplete data from both observational studies andrandomized trials. Provides a detailed discussion of the practical use of MI withreal-world examples drawn from medical and social statistics. Explores handling non-linear relationships and interactionswith multiple imputation, survival analysis, multilevel multipleimputation, sensitivity analysis via multiple imputation, usingnon-response weights with multiple imputation and doubly robustmultiple imputation. Multiple Imputation and its Application is aimed atquantitative researchers and students in the medical and socialsciences with the aim of clarifying the issues raised by theanalysis of incomplete data data, outlining the rationale for MIand describing how to consider and address the issues that arise inits application.

Artificial "neural networks" are widely used as flexible models for classification and regression applications, but questions remain about how the power of these models can be safely exploited when training data is limited. This book demonstrates how Bayesian methods allow complex neural network models to be used without fear of the "overfitting" that can occur with traditional training methods. Insight into the nature of these complex Bayesian models is provided by a theoretical investigation of the priors over functions that underlie them. A practical implementation of Bayesian neural network learning using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods is also described, and software for it is freely available over the Internet. Presupposing only basic knowledge of probability and statistics, this book should be of interest to researchers in statistics, engineering, and artificial intelligence.

The book offers an accessible reference for researchers in the probability, statistics and special functions communities. It gives a variety of interdisciplinary relations between the two main ingredients of stochastic processes and orthogonal polynomials. It covers topics like time dependent and asymptotic analysis for birth-death processes and diffusions, martingale relations for Lévy processes, stochastic integrals and Stein's approximation method. Almost all well-known orthogonal polynomials, which are brought together in the so-called Askey Scheme, come into play. This volume clearly illustrates the powerful mathematical role of orthogonal polynomials in the analysis of stochastic processes and is made accessible for all mathematicians with a basic background in probability theory and mathematical analysis. Wim Schoutens is a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (Belgium). He received his PhD in Science from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.

The most widely used statistical method in seasonal adjustment is implemented in the X-11 Variant of the Census Method II Seasonal Adjustment Program. Developed by the US Bureau of the Census, it resulted in the X-11-ARIMA software and the X-12-ARIMA. While these integrate parametric methods, they remain close to the initial X-11 method, and it is this "core" that Seasonal Adjustment with the X-11 Method focuses on. It will be an important reference for government agencies, and other serious users of economic data.