Generic inference on quantile and quantile effect functions for discrete outcomes

Quantile and quantile effect functions are important tools for descriptive and inferential analysis due to their natural and intuitive interpretation. Existing inference methods for these functions do not apply to discrete random variables. This paper offers a simple, practical construction of simultaneous confidence bands for quantile and quantile effect functions of possibly discrete random variables. It is based on a natural transformation of simultaneous confidence bands for distribution functions, which are readily available for many problems. The construction is generic and does not depend on the nature of the underlying problem. It works in conjunction with parametric, semiparametric, and nonparametric modeling strategies and does not depend on the sampling scheme. We apply our method to characterize the distributional impact of insurance coverage on health care utilization and obtain the distributional decomposition of the racial test score gap. Our analysis generates new, interesting empirical findings, and complements previous analyses that focused on mean effects only. In both applications, the outcomes of interest are discrete rendering existing inference methods invalid for obtaining uniform confidence bands for quantile and quantile effects functions.https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05142First author draf

Aided diagnosis of structural pathologies with an expert system

Sustainability and safety are social demands for long-life buildings. Suitable inspection and maintenance tasks on structural elements are needed for keeping buildings safely in service. Any malfunction that causes structural damage could be called pathology by analogy between structural engineering and medicine. Even the easiest evaluation tasks require expensive training periods that may be shortened with a suitable tool. This work presents an expert system (called Doctor House or DH) for diagnosing pathologies of structural elements in buildings. DH differs from other expert systems when it deals with uncertainty in a far easier but still useful way and it is capable of aiding during the initial survey 'in situ', when damage should be detected at a glance. DH is a powerful tool that represents complex knowledge gathered from bibliography and experts. Knowledge codification and uncertainty treatment are the main achievements presented. Finally, DH was tested and validated during real surveys.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Stochastic Ordering under Conditional Modelling of Extreme Values: Drug-Induced Liver Injury

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major public health issue and of serious concern for the pharmaceutical industry. Early detection of signs of a drug's potential for DILI is vital for pharmaceutical companies' evaluation of new drugs. A combination of extreme values of liver specific variables indicate potential DILI (Hy's Law). We estimate the probability of severe DILI using the Heffernan and Tawn (2004) conditional dependence model which arises naturally in applications where a multidimensional random variable is extreme in at least one component. We extend the current model by including the assumption of stochastically ordered survival curves for different doses in a Phase 3 study.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure