Related papers: Statistical Considerations for Cross-Sectional HIV…
Applied researchers in biomedicine and related fields are often interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment or intervention. Although randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for establishing causal effects,…
Threshold tests have recently been proposed as a useful method for detecting bias in lending, hiring, and policing decisions. For example, in the case of credit extensions, these tests aim to estimate the bar for granting loans to white and…
High-dimensional data can be useful for causal inference by providing many confounders that may bolster the plausibility of the ignorability assumption. Propensity score methods are powerful tools for causal inference, are popular in health…
In this paper we propose an automatic bandwidth selection of the recursive kernel density estimators with missing data in the context of global and local density estimation. We showed that, using the selected bandwidth and a special…
Background: After a decade of a treatment as prevention (TasP) strategy based on progressive HIV testing scale-up and earlier treatment, a reduction in the estimated number of new infections in men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) in England had…
The United Nations (UN) issued official probabilistic population projections for all countries to 2100 in July 2015. This was done by simulating future levels of total fertility and life expectancy from Bayesian hierarchical models, and…
We present a practical guide for the analysis of regression discontinuity (RD) designs in biomedical contexts. We begin by introducing key concepts, assumptions, and estimands within both the continuity-based framework and the local…
Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is an approach to sampling design and inference in hard-to-reach human populations. Typically, a sampling frame is not available, and population members are difficult to identify or recruit from broader…
Recently, ultra high-throughput sequencing of RNA (RNA-Seq) has been developed as an approach for analysis of gene expression. By obtaining tens or even hundreds of millions of reads of transcribed sequences, an RNA-Seq experiment can offer…
In early HIV infection, the virus population escapes from multiple CD8+ cell responses. The later an escape mutation emerges, the slower it outgrows its competition, i. e. the escape rate is lower. This pattern could indicate that the…
When modelling HIV epidemics, it is important to incorporate set-point viral load and its heritability. As set-point viral load distributions can differ significantly amongst epidemics, it is imperative to account for the observed local…
In cancer biomarker development, a key objective is to evaluate whether a new biomarker, when combined with an established one, improves early cancer detection compared to using the established biomarker alone. Incremental value is often…
The extent to which ART (anti-retroviral therapy) reduces HIV transmission has received attention in recent years. Using data on the relationship between transmission and viral load we show that transmission saturates at high viral loads.…
Accurate estimates of the reproduction ratio are crucial to project infectious disease epidemic evolution and guide public health response. Here, we prove that estimates of the reproduction ratio based on inference from surveillance data…
HIV pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) has become essential for global HIV control, but its implementation coincides with rising bacterial STI rates among men who have sex with men (MSM). While risk-compensation behavioral changes like reduced…
The government's effort to alleviate HIV stigma has been justified by the suppression effect of stigma on the HIV testing rate. Nevertheless, the deterrence effect of stigma on undesirable sexual behaviours has long been overlooked. This…
Seasonal influenza is a sometimes surprisingly impactful disease, causing thousands of deaths per year along with much additional morbidity. Timely knowledge of the outbreak state is valuable for managing an effective response. The current…
The search to understand how the HIV virus spreads inside the human body and how the immune response works to control it has motivated studies related to Mathematical Immunology. Actually, researches include the idea of mathematical models…
Random mixing in host populations has been a convenient simplifying assumption in the study of epidemics, but neglects important differences in contact rates within and between population groups. For HIV/AIDS, the assumption of random…
Representative risk estimation is fundamental to clinical decision-making. However, risks are often estimated from non-representative epidemiologic studies, which usually underrepresent minorities. "Model-based" methods use population…