title: Smoothing grouped bivariate data to obtain the incubation period distribution of AIDS.
abstract: We use a penalized likelihood approach to obtain a smooth estimate of a bivariate distribution from grouped data where each observation consists of a region in a plane. The purpose of the analysis is to estimate the incubation period distribution of AIDS from the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, a prevalent cohort of homosexual men. In this article we illustrate the usefulness of the penalized likelihood approach. We also discuss the use of a cross-validation and a Bayesian scheme to choose the smoothing parameters and bootstrap samples to assess uncertainty.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, UCLA School of Public Health 90024.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chon
mesh_terms: D015492:AIDS Serodiagnosis / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000635:transmission; D015331:Cohort Studies; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006716:Homosexuality; D006801:Humans; D015141:Los Angeles; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015337:Multicenter Studies as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results