M.Elizabeth Halloran - Böcker

This volume contains refereed papers from a workshop on Statistics in Genetics held as part of the six-week symposium on Statistics in the Health Sciences held by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in the summer of 1997. The week on genetics provided a forum for lively discussion among an unusual mix of statistical scientists and population geneticists. The field of statistical genetics is growing and expanding. Though the Genome Project will eventually result in the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of several other organisms, there will still be a need for good statistics for family studies of complex diseases. Of special interest is the growing recognition of the potential role of interaction of mitochondrial genes with nuclear genes to produce many chronic or degenerative disorders. There is still much room for improving model building in phylogenetics analysis, particularly in understanding inference in this arena. The use of statistics for assessing identification in criminal and paternity cases through DNA is also becoming more widespread. The controversy over these methods is likely to rage for many years to come. The papers in this volume are contributions by some of the leading researchers in the field to the current topics in statistical genetics. One section deals with DNA sequence matching and issues related to forensics. Another group of papers deals with statistical problems of modeling phylogenies and inferential difficulties related to the complex tree structures produced, as well as the method of coalescence. Another group of papers is concerned with human genetics, including the identification of disease genes, and the

This volume contains refereed papers by participants in the two weeks on Clinical Trials and one week on Epidemiology and the Environment held as part of the six weeks workshop on Statistics in the Health Sciences Applications at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) in the summer of 1997. Donald Berry was in charge of the weeks on clinical trials, and Elizabeth Halloran organized the week on epidemiology and the environment. The collection includes a major contribution from Jamie Robins, Andrea Rotnitzky, and Daniel Scharfstein on sensitivity analysis for selection bias and unmeasured confounding in missing data and causal and inference models. In another paper, Jamie Robins presents a new class of causal models called marginal structural models. Alan Hubbard, Mark van der Laan, and Jamie Robins present a methodology for consistent and efficient estimation of treatment-specific survival functions in observational settings. Brian Leroux, Xingye Lei, and Norman Breslow present a new mixed model for spatial dependence for estimating disease rates in small areas.Andrew Lawson and Allan Clark demonstrate Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for clustering in spatial epidemiology. Colin Chen, David Chock, and Sandra Winkler present a simulation study examining confounding in estimation of the epidemiologic effect of air pollution. Dalene Stangl discusses issues in the use of reference priors and Bayes factors in analyzing clinical trials. Stephen George reviews the role of surrogate endpoints in cancer clinical trials.

This volume contains refereed papers from a workshop on Statistics in Genetics held as part of the six-week symposium on Statistics in the Health Sciences held by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in the summer of 1997. The week on genetics provided a forum for lively discussion among an unusual mix of statistical scientists and population geneticists. The field of statistical genetics is growing and expanding. Though the Genome Project will eventually result in the sequencing of the human genome, as well as the genomes of several other organisms, there will still be a need for good statistics for family studies of complex diseases. Of special interest is the growing recognition of the potential role of interaction of mitochondrial genes with nuclear genes to produce many chronic or degenerative disorders. There is still much room for improving model building in phylogenetics analysis, particularly in understanding inference in this arena. The use of statistics for assessing identification in criminal and paternity cases through DNA is also becoming more widespread. The controversy over these methods is likely to rage for many years to come. The papers in this volume are contributions by some of the leading researchers in the field to the current topics in statistical genetics. One section deals with DNA sequence matching and issues related to forensics. Another group of papers deals with statistical problems of modeling phylogenies and inferential difficulties related to the complex tree structures produced, as well as the method of coalescence. Another group of papers is concerned with human genetics, including the identification of disease genes, and the