SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Vivien Goepp

Publications and source records attributed to Vivien Goepp.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Graph-Based Spatial Segmentation of Health-Related Areal Data

Smoothing is often used to improve the readability and interpretability of noisy areal data. However there are many instances where the underlying quantity is discontinuous. In this case, specific methods are needed to estimate the piecewise constant spatial process. A well-known approach in this setting is to perform segmentation of the signal using the adjacency graph, as does the graph-based fused lasso. But this method does not scale well to large graphs. This article introduces a new method for piecewise-constant spatial estimation that (i) is fast to compute on large graphs and (ii) yields sparser models than the fused lasso (for the same amount of regularization), giving estimates that are easier to interpret. We illustrate our method on simulated data and apply it to real data on overweight prevalence in the Netherlands. Healthy and unhealthy zones are identified which cannot be explained by demographic of socio-economic characteristics. We find that our method is capable of identifying such zones and can assist policy makers with their health-improving strategies. The implementation of our method in R is publicly available at github.com/goepp/graphseg.

stat.ME

Regularized Bidimensional Estimation of the Hazard Rate

In epidemiological or demographic studies, with variable age at onset, a typical quantity of interest is the incidence of a disease (for example the cancer incidence). In these studies, the individuals are usually highly heterogeneous in terms of dates of birth (the cohort) and with respect to the calendar time (the period) and appropriate estimation methods are needed. In this article a new estimation method is presented which extends classical age-period-cohort analysis by allowing interactions between age, period and cohort effects. This paper introduces a bidimensional regularized estimate of the hazard rate where a penalty is introduced on the likelihood of the model. This penalty can be designed either to smooth the hazard rate or to enforce consecutive values of the hazard to be equal, leading to a parsimonious representation of the hazard rate. In the latter case, we make use of an iterative penalized likelihood scheme to approximate the L0 norm, which makes the computation tractable. The method is evaluated on simulated data and applied on breast cancer survival data from the SEER program.

math.ST

Spline Regression with Automatic Knot Selection

In this paper we introduce a new method for automatically selecting knots in spline regression. The approach consists in setting a large number of initial knots and fitting the spline regression through a penalized likelihood procedure called adaptive ridge. The proposed method is similar to penalized spline regression methods (e.g. P-splines), with the noticeable difference that the output is a sparse spline regression with a small number of knots. We show that our method called A-spline, for adaptive splines yields sparse regression models with high interpretability, while having similar predictive performance similar to penalized spline regression methods. A-spline is applied both to simulated and real dataset. A fast and publicly available implementation in R is provided along with this paper.

stat.AP