7,586 research outputs found
Consumer Demand for Healthy Diet: New Evidence from Healthy Eating Index
Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/10.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy,
Synthesis and crystal structure of the first 6a-thiathiophthen metal complex [Mo(CO)_5PPh_(2]2)(µ-C_5H_2S_3)
The first 6a-thiathiophthen metal complex was prepared by treating M(CO_)5[PPh_2CS_2CH_2C≡CH] with a catalytic amount of secondary amine or tertiary amine; the structure of the 6a-thiathiophthen molybdenum complex is confirmed by an X-ray diffraction analysis
An expectation-maximization algorithm for probabilistic reconstructions of full-length isoforms from splice graphs.
Reconstructing full-length transcript isoforms from sequence fragments (such as ESTs) is a major interest and challenge for bioinformatic analysis of pre-mRNA alternative splicing. This problem has been formulated as finding traversals across the splice graph, which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) representation of gene structure and alternative splicing. In this manuscript we introduce a probabilistic formulation of the isoform reconstruction problem, and provide an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for its maximum likelihood solution. Using a series of simulated data and expressed sequences from real human genes, we demonstrate that our EM algorithm can correctly handle various situations of fragmentation and coupling in the input data. Our work establishes a general probabilistic framework for splice graph-based reconstructions of full-length isoforms
Direct and indirect effects of continuous treatments based on generalized propensity score weighting
This paper proposes semi- and nonparametric methods for disentangling the total causal effect of a continuous treatment on an outcome variable into its natural direct effect and the indirect effect that operates through one or several intermediate variables or mediators. Our approach is based on weighting observations by the inverse of two versions of the generalized propensity score (GPS), namely the conditional density of treatment either given observed covariates or given covariates and the mediator. Our effect estimators are shown to be asymptotically normal when the GPS is estimated by either a parametric or a nonparametric kernel-based method. We also provide a simulation study and an application to the Job Corps program
Testing Monotonicity of Mean Potential Outcomes in a Continuous Treatment
While most treatment evaluations focus on binary interventions, a growing
literature also considers continuously distributed treatments, e.g. hours spent
in a training program to assess its effect on labor market outcomes. In this
paper, we propose a Cram\'er-von Mises-type test for testing whether the mean
potential outcome given a specific treatment has a weakly monotonic
relationship with the treatment dose under a weak unconfoundedness assumption.
This appears interesting for testing shape restrictions, e.g. whether
increasing the treatment dose always has a non-negative effect, no matter what
the baseline level of treatment is. We formally show that the proposed test
controls asymptotic size and is consistent against any fixed alternative. These
theoretical findings are supported by the method's finite sample behavior in
our Monte-Carlo simulations. As an empirical illustration, we apply our test to
the Job Corps study and reject a weakly monotonic relationship between the
treatment (hours in academic and vocational training) and labor market outcomes
like earnings or employment
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