published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Motivated by problems in medicine, biology, engineering and economics, con- strained parameter problems arise in a wide variety of applications. Among them the application to the dose-response of a certain drug in development has attracted much interest. To investigate such a relationship, we often need to conduct a dose- response experiment with multiple groups associated with multiple dose levels of the drug. The dose-response relationship can be modeled by a shape-restricted normal regression. We develop an iterative two-step ascent algorithm to estimate normal means and variances subject to simultaneous constraints. Each iteration consists of two parts: an expectation{maximization (EM) algorithm that is utilized in Step 1 to compute the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of the restricted means when variances are given, and a newly developed restricted De Pierro algorithm that is used in Step 2 to find the MLEs of the restricted variances when means are given. These constraints include the simple order, tree order, umbrella order, and so on. A bootstrap approach is provided to calculate standard errors of the restricted MLEs. Applications to the analysis of two real datasets on radioim-munological assay of cortisol and bioassay of peptides are presented to illustrate the proposed methods. Liu (2000) discussed the maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian estimation in a multinomial model with simplex constraints by formulating this constrained parameter problem into an unconstrained parameter problem in the framework of missing data. To utilize the EM and data augmentation (DA) algorithms, he introduced latent variables {Zil;Yil} (to be defined later). However, the proposed DA algorithm in his paper did not provide the necessary individual conditional distributions of Yil given (the observed data and) the updated parameter estimates. Indeed, the EM algorithm developed in his paper is based on the assumption that{ Yil} are fixed given values. Fortunately, the EM algorithm is invariant under any choice of the value of Yil, so the final result is always correct. We have derived the aforesaid conditional distributions and hence provide a valid DA algorithm. A real data set is used for illustration. / published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

In statistical inference, one is often interested in estimating the distribution of a root, which is a function of the data and the parameters only. Knowledge of the distribution of a root is useful for inference problems such as hypothesis testing and the construction of a confidence set. Shrinkage-type estimators have become popular in statistical inference due to their smaller mean squared errors. In this thesis, the performance of different bootstrap methods is investigated for estimating the distributions of roots which are constructed based on shrinkage estimators. Focus is on two shrinkage estimation problems, namely the James-Stein estimation and the model selection problem in simple linear regression. A hybrid bootstrap procedure and a bootstrap test method are proposed to estimate the distributions of the roots of interest. In the two shrinkage problems, the asymptotic errors of the traditional n-out-of-n bootstrap, m-out-of-n bootstrap and the proposed methods are derived under a moving parameter framework. The problem of the lack of uniform consistency of the n-out-of-n and the m-out-of-n bootstraps is exposed. It is shown that the proposed methods have better overall performance, in the sense that they yield improved convergence rates over almost the whole range of possible values of the underlying parameters. Simulation studies are carried out to illustrate the theoretical findings. / published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Stochastic programming facilitates decision making under uncertainty. It is usually impractical or impossible to find the optimal solution to a stochastic problem, and approximations are required. Sampling-based approximations are simple and attractive, but the standard point estimate of optimization and the Monte Carlo approximation. We provide a method to reduce this bias, and hence provide a better, i.e., tighter, confidence interval on the optimal value and on a candidate solution's optimality gap. Our method requires less restrictive assumptions on the structure of the bias than previously-available estimators. Our estimators adapt to problem-specific properties, and we provide a family of estimators, which allows flexibility in choosing the level of aggressiveness for bias reduction. We establish desirable statistical properties of our estimators and empirically compare them with known techniques on test problems from the literature.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

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