Journal of Agricultural Biological and Environmental Statistics最新文献

Numerous studies have examined the associations between long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) and adverse health outcomes. Recently, many of these studies have begun to employ high-resolution predicted PM_2.5 concentrations, which are subject to measurement error. Previous approaches for exposure measurement error correction have either been applied in non-causal settings or have only considered a categorical exposure. Moreover, most procedures have failed to account for uncertainty induced by error correction when fitting an exposure-response function (ERF). To remedy these deficiencies, we develop a multiple imputation framework that combines regression calibration and Bayesian techniques to estimate a causal ERF. We demonstrate how the output of the measurement error correction steps can be seamlessly integrated into a Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) estimator of the causal ERF. We also demonstrate how locally-weighted smoothing of the posterior samples from BART can be used to create a more accurate ERF estimate. Our proposed approach also properly propagates the exposure measurement error uncertainty to yield accurate standard error estimates. We assess the robustness of our proposed approach in an extensive simulation study. We then apply our methodology to estimate the effects of PM_2.5 on all-cause mortality among Medicare enrollees in New England from 2000-2012.

We propose a new solution under the Bayesian framework to simultaneously estimate mean-based asynchronous changepoints in spatially correlated functional time series. Unlike previous methods that assume a shared changepoint at all spatial locations or ignore spatial correlation, our method treats changepoints as a spatial process. This allows our model to respect spatial heterogeneity and exploit spatial correlations to improve estimation. Our method is derived from the ubiquitous cumulative sum (CUSUM) statistic that dominates changepoint detection in functional time series. However, instead of directly searching for the maximum of the CUSUM-based processes, we build spatially correlated two-piece linear models with appropriate variance structure to locate all changepoints at once. The proposed linear model approach increases the robustness of our method to variability in the CUSUM process, which, combined with our spatial correlation model, improves changepoint estimation near the edges. We demonstrate through extensive simulation studies that our method outperforms existing functional changepoint estimators in terms of both estimation accuracy and uncertainty quantification, under either weak or strong spatial correlation, and weak or strong change signals. Finally, we demonstrate our method using a temperature data set and a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) study. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online. Supplementary materials for this article are available at 10.1007/s13253-022-00519-w.

In grassland ecosystems, it is well known that increasing plant species diversity can improve ecosystem functions (i.e., ecosystem responses), for example, by increasing productivity and reducing weed invasion. Diversity-Interactions models use species proportions and their interactions as predictors in a regression framework to assess biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships. However, it can be difficult to model numerous interactions if there are many species, and interactions may be temporally variable or dependent on spatial planting patterns. We developed a new Diversity-Interactions mixed model for jointly assessing many species interactions and within-plot species planting pattern over multiple years. We model pairwise interactions using a small number of fixed parameters that incorporate spatial effects and supplement this by including all pairwise interaction variables as random effects, each constrained to have the same variance within each year. The random effects are indexed by pairs of species within plots rather than a plot-level factor as is typical in mixed models, and capture remaining variation due to pairwise species interactions parsimoniously. We apply our novel methodology to three years of weed invasion data from a 16-species grassland experiment that manipulated plant species diversity and spatial planting pattern and test its statistical properties in a simulation study.Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online. Supplementary materials for this article are available at 10.1007/s13253-022-00505-2.