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This book presents a systematic and comprehensive treatment of various prior processes that have been developed over the past four decades for dealing with Bayesian approach to solving selected nonparametric inference problems. This revised edition has been substantially expanded to reflect the current interest in this area. After an overview of different prior processes, it examines the now pre-eminent Dirichlet process and its variants including hierarchical processes, then addresses new processes such as dependent Dirichlet, local Dirichlet, time-varying and spatial processes, all of which exploit the countable mixture representation of the Dirichlet process. It subsequently discusses various neutral to right type processes, including gamma and extended gamma, beta and beta-Stacy processes, and then describes the Chinese Restaurant, Indian Buffet and infinite gamma-Poisson processes, which prove to be very useful in areas such as machine learning, information retrieval and featural modeling. Tailfree and Polya tree and their extensions form a separate chapter, while the last two chapters present the Bayesian solutions to certain estimation problems pertaining to the distribution function and its functional based on complete data as well as right censored data. Because of the conjugacy property of some of these processes, most solutions are presented in closed form. However, the current interest in modeling and treating large-scale and complex data also poses a problem – the posterior distribution, which is essential to Bayesian analysis, is invariably not in a closed form, making it necessary to resort to simulation. Accordingly, the book also introduces several computational procedures, such as the Gibbs sampler, Blocked Gibbs sampler and slice sampling, highlighting essential steps of algorithms while discussing specific models. In addition, it features crucial steps of proofs and derivations, explains the relationships between different processes and provides further clarifications to promote a deeper understanding. Lastly, it includes a comprehensive list of references, equipping readers to explore further on their own.

This book contains a rich set of tools for nonparametric analyses, and the purpose of this text is to provide guidance to students and professional researchers on how R is used for nonparametric data analysis in the biological sciences: To introduce when nonparametric approaches to data analysis are appropriateTo introduce the leading nonparametric tests commonly used in biostatistics and how R is used to generate appropriate statistics for each testTo introduce common figures typically associated with nonparametric data analysis and how R is used to generate appropriate figures in support of each data set The book focuses on how R is used to distinguish between data that could be classified as nonparametric as opposed to data that could be classified as parametric, with both approaches to data classification covered extensively. Following an introductory lesson on nonparametric statistics for the biological sciences, the book is organized into eight self-contained lessons on various analyses and tests using R to broadly compare differences between data sets and statistical approach.

As chapters in this book demonstrate, BNP has important uses in clinical sciences and inference for issues like unknown partitions in genomics. Nonparametric Bayesian approaches (BNP) play an ever expanding role in biostatistical inference from use in proteomics to clinical trials. Many research problems involve an abundance of data and require flexible and complex probability models beyond the traditional parametric approaches. As this book's expert contributors show, BNP approaches can be the answer. Survival Analysis, in particular survival regression, has traditionally used BNP, but BNP's potential is now very broad. This applies to important tasks like arrangement of patients into clinically meaningful subpopulations and segmenting the genome into functionally distinct regions. This book is designed to both review and introduce application areas for BNP. While existing books provide theoretical foundations, this book connects theory to practice through engaging examples and research questions. Chapters cover: clinical trials, spatial inference, proteomics, genomics, clustering, survival analysis and ROC curve.

This book, written by two mathematicians from the University of Southern California, provides a broad introduction to the important subject of nonlinear mixture models from a Bayesian perspective. It contains background material, a brief description of Markov chain theory, as well as novel algorithms and their applications. It is self-contained and unified in presentation, which makes it ideal for use as an advanced textbook by graduate students and as a reference for independent researchers. The explanations in the book are detailed enough to capture the interest of the curious reader, and complete enough to provide the necessary background material needed to go further into the subject and explore the research literature.In this book the authors present Bayesian methods of analysis for nonlinear, hierarchical mixture models, with a finite, but possibly unknown, number of components. These methods are then applied to various problems including population pharmacokinetics and gene expression analysis. In population pharmacokinetics, the nonlinear mixture model, based on previous clinical data, becomes the prior distribution for individual therapy. For gene expression data, one application included in the book is to determine which genes should be associated with the same component of the mixture (also known as a clustering problem). The book also contains examples of computer programs written in BUGS. This is the first book of its kind to cover many of the topics in this field.

​​Non-parametric methods are widely used for studying populations that take on a ranked order (such as movie reviews receiving one to four stars). The use of non-parametric methods may be necessary when data have a ranking but no clear numerical interpretation, such as when assessing preferences. In terms of levels of measurement, non-parametric methods result in'ordinal'data. As non-parametric methods make fewer assumptions, their applicability is much wider than the corresponding parametric methods. In particular, they may be applied in situations where less is known about the application in question. Also, due to the reliance on fewer assumptions, non-parametric methods are more robust. Non-parametric methods have many popular applications, and are widely used in research in the fields of the behavioral sciences and biomedicine. This is a textbook on non-parametric statistics for applied research. The authors propose to use a realistic yet mostly fictional situation and series of dialogues to illustrate in detail the statistical processes required to complete data analysis. This book draws on a readers existing elementary knowledge of statistical analyses to broaden his/her research capabilities. The material within the book is covered in such a way that someone with a very limited knowledge of statistics would be able to read and understand the concepts detailed in the text.The “real world” scenario to be presented involves a multidisciplinary team of behavioral, medical, crime analysis, and policy analysis professionals work together to answer specific empirical questions regarding real-world applied problems. The reader is introduced to the team and the data set, and through the course of the text follows the team as they progress through the decision making process of narrowing the data and the research questions to answer the applied problem. In this way, abstract statistical concepts are translated into concreteand specific language.This text uses one data set from which all examples are taken. This is radically different from other statistics books which provide a varied array of examples and data sets. Using only one data set facilitates reader-directed teaching and learning by providing multiple research questions which are integrated rather than using disparate examples and completely unrelated research questions and data.