Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society), Vol. 180, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2017), pp. 1191-1209 (19 pages) Area level models, such as the Fay–Herriot model, aim to improve ...

In many applications, interest focuses on assessing the relationship between a predictor and a multivariate outcome variable, and there may be prior knowledge about the shape of the regression curves.

Introduction: The diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is based on spirometry tests, which are difficult to perform in some populations. Objectives: We aimed to construct a risk ...