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Bayesian estimation of cognitive decline in patients with alzheimer's disease
Author(s) -
Béalisle Patrick,
Joseph Lawrence,
Wolfson David B.,
Zhou Xiaojie
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
canadian journal of statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.804
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1708-945X
pISSN - 0319-5724
DOI - 10.2307/3315864
Subject(s) - gibbs sampling , bayesian probability , bayes' theorem , cognition , cognitive decline , econometrics , estimation , bayesian hierarchical modeling , bayesian inference , statistics , computer science , disease , psychology , mathematics , dementia , medicine , psychiatry , economics , management
Recently, there has been great interest in estimating the decline in cognitive ability in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Measuring decline is not straightforward, since one must consider the choice of scale to measure cognitive ability, possible floor and ceiling effects, between‐patient variability, and the unobserved age of onset. The authors demonstrate how to account for the above features by modeling decline in scores on the Mini‐Mental State Exam in two different data sets. To this end, they use hierarchical Bayesian models with change points, for which posterior distributions are calculated using the Gibbs sampler. They make comparisons between several such models using both prior and posterior Bayes factors, and compare the results from the models suggested by these two model selection criteria.