The purpose of this book is to evaluate a new approach to the analysis and reporting of the large-scale surveys for the National Assessment of Educational Progress carried out for the National Center for Education Statistics. The need for a new approach was driven by the demands for secondary analysis of the survey data by researchers who needed analyses more detailed than those published by NCES, and the need to accelerate the processing and publication of results from the surveys. This new approach is based on a full multilevel statistical and psychometric model for students' responses to the test items, taking into account the design of the survey, the backgrounds of the students, and the classes, schools and communities in which the students were located. The authors detail a fully integrated single model that incorporates both the survey design and the psychometric model by extending the traditional form of the psychometric model to accommodate the design structure while allowing for student, teacher, and school covariates.

Features Probability models are developed from the shape of the sample empirical cumulative distribution function, (cdf) or a transformation of it. Bounds for the value of the population cumulative distribution function are obtained from the Beta distribution at each point of the empirical cdf. Bayes's theorem is developed from the properties of the screening test for a rare condition. The multinomial distribution provides an always-true model for any randomly sampled data. The model-free bootstrap method for finding the precision of a sample estimate has a model-based parallel - the Bayesian bootstrap - based on the always-true multinomial distribution. The Bayesian posterior distributions of model parameters can be obtained from the maximum likelihood analysis of the model.

Filling a gap in current Bayesian theory, Statistical Inference: An Integrated Bayesian/Likelihood Approach presents a unified Bayesian treatment of parameter inference and model comparisons that can be used with simple diffuse prior specifications. This novel approach provides new solutions to difficult model comparison problems and offers direct Bayesian counterparts of frequentist t-tests and other standard statistical methods for hypothesis testing. After an overview of the competing theories of statistical inference, the book introduces the Bayes/likelihood approach used throughout. It presents Bayesian versions of one- and two-sample t-tests, along with the corresponding normal variance tests. The author then thoroughly discusses the use of the multinomial model and noninformative Dirichlet priors in "model-free" or nonparametric Bayesian survey analysis, before covering normal regression and analysis of variance. In the chapter on binomial and multinomial data, he gives alternatives, based on Bayesian analyses, to current frequentist nonparametric methods. The text concludes with new goodness-of-fit methods for assessing parametric models and a discussion of two-level variance component models and finite mixtures. Emphasizing the principles of Bayesian inference and Bayesian model comparison, this book develops a unique methodology for solving challenging inference problems. It also includes a concise review of the various approaches to inference.

Filling a gap in current Bayesian theory, Statistical Inference: An Integrated Bayesian/Likelihood Approach presents a unified Bayesian treatment of parameter inference and model comparisons that can be used with simple diffuse prior specifications. This novel approach provides new solutions to difficult model comparison problems and offers direct Bayesian counterparts of frequentist t-tests and other standard statistical methods for hypothesis testing.

After an overview of the competing theories of statistical inference, the book introduces the Bayes/likelihood approach used throughout. It presents Bayesian versions of one- and two-sample t-tests, along with the corresponding normal variance tests. The author then thoroughly discusses the use of the multinomial model and noninformative Dirichlet priors in "model-free" or nonparametric Bayesian survey analysis, before covering normal regression and analysis of variance. In the chapter on binomial and multinomial data, he gives alternatives, based on Bayesian analyses, to current frequentist nonparametric methods. The text concludes with new goodness-of-fit methods for assessing parametric models and a discussion of two-level variance component models and finite mixtures.

Emphasizing the principles of Bayesian inference and Bayesian model comparison, this book develops a unique methodology for solving challenging inference problems. It also includes a concise review of the various approaches to inference.

The purpose of this book is to evaluate a new approach to the analysis and reporting of the large-scale surveys for the National Assessment of Educational Progress carried out for the National Center for Education Statistics. The need for a new approach was driven by the demands for secondary analysis" "of the survey data by researchers who needed analyses more detailed than those published by NCES, and the need to accelerate the processing and publication of results from the surveys.

This new approach is based on a full multilevel statistical and psychometric model for students' responses to the test items, taking into account the design of the survey, the backgrounds of the students, and the classes, schools and communities in which the students were located. The authors detail a fully integrated single model that incorporates both the survey design and the psychometric model by extending the traditional form of the psychometric model to accommodate the design structure while allowing for student, teacher, and school covariates.

R is now the most widely used statistical package/language in university statistics departments and many research organisations. Its great advantages are that for many years it has been the leading-edge statistical package/language and that it can be freely downloaded from the R web site. Its cooperative development and open code also attracts many contributors meaning that the modelling and data analysis possibilities in R are much richer than in GLIM4, and so the R edition can be substantially more comprehensive than the GLIM4 edition. This text provides a comprehensive treatment of the theory of statistical modelling in R with an emphasis on applications to practical problems and an expanded discussion of statistical theory. A wide range of case studies is provided, using the normal, binomial, Poisson, multinomial, gamma, exponential and Weibull distributions, making this book ideal for graduates and research students in applied statistics and a wide range of quantitative disciplines.

This new edition of the successful multi-disciplinary text Statistical Modelling in GLIM takes into account new developments in both statistical software and statistical modelling. Including three new chapters on mixture and random effects models, it provides a comprehensive treatment of the theory of statistical modelling with generalised linear models with an emphasis on applications to practical problems and an expanded discussion of statistical theory. A wide range of case studies is also provided, using the normal, binomial, Poisson, multinomial, gamma, exponential and Weibull distributions. This book is ideal for graduates and research students in applied statistics and a wide range of quantitative disciplines, including biology, medicine and the social sciences. Professional statisticians at all levels will also find it an invaluable desktop companion.