A nonparametric likelihood test for detecting discordance between two measurements with application to censored viral load determinations

Bayesian inference for skew-normal mixture models with left-censoring

Assays to measure concentration of antibody after vaccination are often subject to left-censoring due to a lower detection limit (LDL), leading to a high proportion of observations below the detection limit. Not accounting for such left-censoring appropriately can lead to biased parameter estimates. To properly adjust for left-censoring and a high proportion of observations at LDL, this article proposes a mixture model combining a point mass below LDL and a Tobit model with skew-elliptical error distribution. We show that skew-elliptical distributions, where the skew-normal and skew-t are special cases, have great flexibility for simultaneously handling left-censoring, skewness, and heaviness in the tails of a distribution of a response variable with left-censored data. A Bayesian procedure is used to estimate model parameters. Two real data sets from a study of the measles vaccine and an HIV/AIDS study are used to illustrate the proposed models.

Dimension reduced kernel estimation for distribution function with incomplete data

This work focuses on the estimation of distribution functions with incomplete data, where the variable of interest Y has ignorable missingness but the covariate X is always observed. When X is high dimensional, parametric approaches to incorporate X - information is encumbered by the risk of model misspecification and nonparametric approaches by the curse of dimensionality. We propose a semiparametric approach, which is developed under a nonparametric kernel regression framework, but with a parametric working index to condense the high dimensional X - information for reduced dimension. This kernel dimension reduction estimator has double robustness to model misspecification and is most efficient if the working index adequately conveys the X - information about the distribution of Y. Numerical studies indicate better performance of the semiparametric estimator over its parametric and nonparametric counterparts. We apply the kernel dimension reduction estimation to an HIV study for the effect of antiretroviral therapy on HIV virologic suppression.