Accounting For Multiple Pollutants In Pollution-Mortality Studies

: There is extensive and continuing concern over the human health eects of atmospheric particulate matter, which is reected in the debate over the 1997 EPA standards. Much of the evidence supporting such standards comes from statistical and epidemiological studies employing time series regression of mortality and morbidity on a variety of covariates including particulate matter. Among the statistical issues raised by such studies are multicollinearity and selection eects when large numbers of related regressors are considered simultaneously. We propose a method of dealing with such issues by viewing them in an empirical Bayes context. The relation to existing methods of dealing with multicollinearity, including ridge regression and principal components Yuntae Kim is a graduate student and Montserrat Fuentes is Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. Dan Spitzner and Zhengjun Zhang are graduate students and Richard L. Smith is Pro..