Faculty Bibliography

The quality of a production process is often judged by a quality assurance audit, which is essentially a structured system of sampling inspection plan. The defects of sampled products are assessed and compared with a quality standard, which is determined from a tradeoff among manufacturing costs, operating costs and customer needs. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical Bayes quality measurement plan that assumes an implicit prior for the hyperparameters. The resulting posterior means and variances are obtained adaptively using a parametric bootstrap method. (C) Published in 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. $$:

Empirical best linear unbiased prediction (EBLUP) method uses a linear mixed model in combining information from different sources of information. This method is particularly useful in small area problems. The variability of an EBLUP is traditionally measured by the mean squared prediction error (MSPE), and interval estimates are generally constructed using estimates of the MSPE. Such methods have shortcomings like under-coverage or over-coverage, excessive length and lack of interpretability. We propose a parametric bootstrap approach to estimate the entire distribution of a suitably centered and scaled EBLUP. The bootstrap histogram is highly accurate, and differs from the true EBLUP distribution by only O(d(3)n(-3/2)), where d is the number of parameters and n the number of observations. This result is used to obtain highly accurate prediction intervals. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of this method over existing techniques of constructing prediction intervals in linear mixed models. $$: