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1. Robust Bayesian growth curve modelling using conditional medians

   https://doi.org/10.1111/bmsp.12216  

   Tong, Xin; Zhang, Tonghao; Zhou, Jianhui (September 2020, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology)

   Growth curve models have been widely used to analyse longitudinal data in social and behavioural sciences. Although growth curve models with normality assumptions are relatively easy to estimate, practical data are rarely normal. Failing to account for non‐normal data may lead to unreliable model estimation and misleading statistical inference. In this work, we propose a robust approach for growth curve modelling using conditional medians that are less sensitive to outlying observations. Bayesian methods are applied for model estimation and inference. Based on the existing work on Bayesian quantile regression using asymmetric Laplace distributions, we use asymmetric Laplace distributions to convert the problem of estimating a median growth curve model into a problem of obtaining the maximum likelihood estimator for a transformed model. Monte Carlo simulation studies have been conducted to evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed approach with data containing outliers or leverage observations. The results show that the proposed approach yields more accurate and efficient parameter estimates than traditional growth curve modelling. We illustrate the application of our robust approach using conditional medians based on a real data set from the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project. 

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2. Exploring Class Enumeration in Bayesian Growth Mixture Modeling Based on Conditional Medians

   https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.624149  

   Kim, Seohyun; Tong, Xin; Ke, Zijun (February 2021, Frontiers in Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Growth mixture modeling is a popular analytic tool for longitudinal data analysis. It detects latent groups based on the shapes of growth trajectories. Traditional growth mixture modeling assumes that outcome variables are normally distributed within each class. When data violate this normality assumption, however, it is well documented that the traditional growth mixture modeling mislead researchers in determining the number of latent classes as well as in estimating parameters. To address nonnormal data in growth mixture modeling, robust methods based on various nonnormal distributions have been developed. As a new robust approach, growth mixture modeling based on conditional medians has been proposed. In this article, we present the results of two simulation studies that evaluate the performance of the median-based growth mixture modeling in identifying the correct number of latent classes when data follow the normality assumption or have outliers. We also compared the performance of the median-based growth mixture modeling to the performance of traditional growth mixture modeling as well as robust growth mixture modeling based on t distributions. For identifying the number of latent classes in growth mixture modeling, the following three Bayesian model comparison criteria were considered: deviance information criterion, Watanabe-Akaike information criterion, and leave-one-out cross validation. For the median-based growth mixture modeling and t -based growth mixture modeling, our results showed that they maintained quite high model selection accuracy across all conditions in this study (ranged from 87 to 100%). In the traditional growth mixture modeling, however, the model selection accuracy was greatly influenced by the proportion of outliers. When sample size was 500 and the proportion of outliers was 0.05, the correct model was preferred in about 90% of the replications, but the percentage dropped to about 40% as the proportion of outliers increased to 0.15. 

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3. One-Bit Normalized Scatter Matrix Estimation For Complex Elliptically Symmetric Distributions

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9053956  

   Liu, Chun-Lin; Vaidyanathan, P. P. (May 2020, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust. Speech, and Signal Proc)

   null (Ed.)

   One-bit quantization has attracted attention in massive MIMO, radar, and array processing, due to its simplicity, low cost, and capability of parameter estimation. Specifically, the shape of the covariance of the unquantized data can be estimated from the arcsine law and onebit data, if the unquantized data is Gaussian. However, in practice, the Gaussian assumption is not satisfied due to outliers. It is known from the literature that outliers can be modeled by complex elliptically symmetric (CES) distributions with heavy tails. This paper shows that the arcsine law remains applicable to CES distributions. Therefore, the normalized scatter matrix of the unquantized data can be readily estimated from one-bit samples derived from CES distributions. The proposed estimator is not only computationally fast but also robust to CES distributions with heavy tails. These attributes will be demonstrated through numerical examples, in terms of computational time and the estimation error. An application in DOA estimation with MUSIC spectrum is also presented. 

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4. Modelling the COVID-19 Infection Trajectory: A Piecewise Linear Quantile Trend Model

   https://doi.org/10.1111/rssb.12453  

   Jiang, Feiyu; Zhao, Zifeng; Shao, Xiaofeng (August 2021, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology)

   Abstract We propose a piecewise linear quantile trend model to analyse the trajectory of the COVID-19 daily new cases (i.e. the infection curve) simultaneously across multiple quantiles. The model is intuitive, interpretable and naturally captures the phase transitions of the epidemic growth rate via change-points. Unlike the mean trend model and least squares estimation, our quantile-based approach is robust to outliers, captures heteroscedasticity (commonly exhibited by COVID-19 infection curves) and automatically delivers both point and interval forecasts with minimal assumptions. Building on a self-normalized (SN) test statistic, this paper proposes a novel segmentation algorithm for multiple change-point estimation. Theoretical guarantees such as segmentation consistency are established under mild and verifiable assumptions. Using the proposed method, we analyse the COVID-19 infection curves in 35 major countries and discover patterns with potentially relevant implications for effectiveness of the pandemic responses by different countries. A simple change-adaptive two-stage forecasting scheme is further designed to generate short-term prediction of COVID-19 cumulative new cases and is shown to deliver accurate forecast valuable to public health decision-making. 

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5. Robust estimation for linear panel data models

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.8732  

   Hamiye_Beyaztas, Beste; Bandyopadhyay, Soutir (September 2020, Statistics in Medicine)

   In different fields of applications including, but not limited to, behavioral, environmental, medical sciences, and econometrics, the use of panel data regression models has become increasingly popular as a general framework for making meaningful statistical inferences. However, when the ordinary least squares (OLS) method is used to estimate the model parameters, presence of outliers may significantly alter the adequacy of such models by producing biased and inefficient estimates. In this work, we propose a new, weighted likelihood based robust estimation procedure for linear panel data models with fixed and random effects. The finite sample performances of the proposed estimators have been illustrated through an extensive simulation study as well as with an application to blood pressure dataset. Our thorough study demonstrates that the proposed estimators show significantly better performances over the traditional methods in the presence of outliers and produce competitive results to the OLS based estimates when no outliers are present in the dataset. 

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