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The comparison of treatments with ordinal responses. / CUHK electronic theses & dissertations collection

In this thesis, we focus on the the comparison of treatments with ordered categorical responses. The three cases of treatment comparisons will all be studied. The main objective of this thesis is to develop more effective comparison methods for treatments with ordinal responses and to address some important issues involved in different comparison problems. Our major statistical approach is to consider ordinal responses as manifestations of some underlying continuous random variables. / The comparison of treatments to detect possible treatment effects is a very important topic in statistical research. It has been drawing significant interests from both academicians and practitioners. Important research work on treatment comparisons dates back several decades. For treatment comparisons, the following three cases are very common: the comparison of two independent treatments; the comparison of treatments with repeated measurements; and the multiple comparison of several treatments. For different cases, the involved research issues are usually different. In many fields of study, the level of measurement for responses of the treatments is ordinal. Many examples can be found in areas such as biostatistics, psychology, sociology, and market research, where the ordered categorical variables play an important role. / This thesis consists of three main parts. In the first part, we consider the modeling of treatments with longitudinal ordinal responses by a latent growth curve. On the basis of such a latent growth curve, we achieve a comprehensive flexible model with straightforward interpretations and a variety of applications including treatment comparison, the analysis of covariates, and equivalence test of treatments. In the second part, we consider the comparison of several treatments with a control for ordinal responses. By considering the ordinal responses as manifestations of some underlying normal random variables, a latent normal distribution model is utilized and the corresponding parameter estimation method is proposed. Further, we also derive testing procedures that compare several treatments with a control under an analytical framework. Both single-step and stepwise procedures are introduced, and these procedures are compared in terms of average power based on a simulation study. In the last part of this thesis, we establish a unified framework for treatment comparisons with ordinal responses, which allows various treatment comparison methods be comprehended using a unified perspective. The latent variable model is also utilized, but the underlying random variables are allowed to have any member of the location-scale distribution family. This latent variable model under such a specification of underlying distributions subsumes many existing models in the literature. A two-step procedure to identify the model and produce the parameter estimates is proposed. Based on this procedure, many important statistical inferences can be conveniently conducted. Furthermore, the sample size determination method based on the latent variable method is also proposed. The proposed latent variable method is compared with the existing methods in terms of power and sample size. / Lu, Tongyu. / Adviser: Wai-Yin Poon. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-06, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-101). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:cuhk.edu.hk/oai:cuhk-dr:cuhk_344853
Date January 2011
ContributorsLu, Tongyu., Chinese University of Hong Kong Graduate School. Division of Statistics.
Source SetsThe Chinese University of Hong Kong
LanguageEnglish, Chinese
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, theses
Formatelectronic resource, microform, microfiche, 1 online resource (ix, 118 leaves : ill.)
RightsUse of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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