
Albert John BailerMiami University | MU · Department of Statistics
Albert John Bailer
PhD Biostatistics
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229
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
January 1989 - December 2012
January 1987 - December 1989
Publications
Publications (229)
What qualities are needed by statisticians to achieve top leadership positions in academia, business, industry and government? Five leaders from statistical societies, national and international statistical offices, and academia share their experiences. They respond to five specific questions. Firstly, is leadership just needed by top management or...
Experiments are routinely conducted to evaluate the toxicity of water effluents or chemicals. In a Ceriodaphnia dubia reproduction test, organisms are exposed to varying concentration levels of the toxicant or other adverse treatment and the number of young produced after a given experiment period are recorded. To analyze the test outcomes, mean re...
The NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards is a trusted resource that displays key information for a collection of chemicals commonly encountered in the workplace. Entries contain chemical structures—occupational exposure limit information ranging from limits based on full-shift time-weighted averages to acute limits such as short-term exposure lim...
In aquatic toxicology experiments, organisms are randomly assigned to an exposure group that receives a particular concentration level of a toxicant (including a control group with no exposure), and their survival, growth, or reproduction outcomes are recorded. Standard experiments use equal numbers of organisms in each exposure group. In the prese...
The need to analyze the complex relationships observed in high-throughput toxicogenomic and other omic platforms has resulted in an explosion of methodological advances in computational toxicology. However, advancements in the literature often outpace the development of software researchers can implement in their pipelines, and existing software is...
In aquatic toxicity tests, responses of interest from organisms exposed to varying concentration levels of the toxicant or other adverse treatment are recorded. These responses are modeled as functions of the concentration and the concentration associated with specified levels of estimated adverse effect are used in risk management. While aquatic t...
Despite the precipitous decline of airborne lead concentrations following the removal of lead in gasoline, lead is still detectable in ambient air in most urban areas. Few studies, however, have examined the health effects of contemporary airborne lead concentrations in children.
Methods:
We estimated monthly air lead exposure among 263 children...
Electric bicycles (e-bikes) with battery-powered assist may overcome barriers to active transportation (i.e., time and perceived effort), benefit cardiometabolic health, and be an environmentally friendly transportation option. This study aimed to compare cardiometabolic responses and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) between a regular bike and a...
Longstanding concerns with the role and interpretation of p-values in statistical practice prompted the American Statistical Association (ASA) to make a statement on p-values. The ASA statement spurred a flurry of responses and discussions by statisticians, with many wondering about the steps necessary to expand the adoption of these principles. In...
p class="3">Traditional and online university courses share expectations for quality content and rigor. Student and faculty concerns about compromised academic integrity and actual instances of academic dishonesty in assessments, especially with online testing, are increasingly troublesome. Recent research suggests that in the absence of proctoring...
Quantitative risk assessments for physical, chemical, biological, occupational, or environmental agents rely on scientific studies to support their conclusions. These studies often include relatively few observations, and, as a result, models used to characterize the risk may include large amounts of uncertainty. The motivation, development, and as...
The fish acute toxicity test method is foundational to aquatic toxicity testing strategies, yet the literature lacks a concise sample size assessment. While various sources address sample size, historical precedent seems to play a larger role than objective measures. Here, a novel and comprehensive quantification of the effect of sample size on est...
Data visualization is an effective strategy to achieve clear scientific data communications. Gerontology has produced a tremendous amount of cross-disciplinary data based on surveys, experiments, and qualitative methods. Types of data and analytical techniques have become more diverse than ever before. However, little is known about how gerontologi...
Quantitative risk assessment often begins with an estimate of the exposure or dose associated with a particular risk level from which exposure levels posing low risk to populations can be extrapolated. For continuous exposures, this value, the benchmark dose, is often defined by a specified increase (or decrease) from the median or mean response at...
Online education continues to grow, bringing opportunities and challenges for students and instructors. One challenge is the perception that academic integrity associated with online tests is compromised due to undetected cheating that yields artificially higher grades. To address these concerns, proctoring software has been developed to address an...
Environmental toxicity refers to the impact of a hazard or stressor at one or more levels of biological organization. This impact can range from molecular and cellular levels to whole organism, population, ecosystem, or landscape levels. The statistical methods employed to examine these impacts will reflect the level of organization and the measure...
In this article we chronicle the evolution of the undergraduate statistical consulting course at Miami University, from canned to client-based projects, and argue that if the course is well designed with suitable mentoring, students can perform remarkably sophisticated analyses of real-world data problems that require solutions beyond the methods e...
Virtually no occupational exposure standards specify the level of risk for the prescribed exposure, and most occupational exposure limits are not based on quantitative risk assessment (QRA) at all. Wider use of QRA could improve understanding of occupational risks while increasing focus on identifying exposure concentrations conferring acceptably l...
Quantitative risk assessment (QRA) characterizes the risk of an adverse health outcome for an organism exposed to a chemical, environmental, physical, or other hazard. Historically, QRAs define risk based upon the increased probability of adverse response because of exposure when compared with the background probability of response in unexposed ind...
Although many experiments in environmental toxicology use standard statistical experimental designs, there are situations that arise where no such standard design is natural or applicable due to logistical constraints. For example, the layout of a lab may suggest that each shelf serve as a block with the number of experimental units per shelf eithe...
Water is the key to life, and aquatic toxicology evaluates the potential adverse outcomes associated with exposure to contaminated waters. These adverse outcomes can be observed at all trophic levels and can be framed at differing levels of ecosystem function. Statistical analysis of concentration-response relationships provides one foundation for...
Environmental toxicity refers to the impact of a hazard or stressor at one or more levels of biological organization. This impact can range from molecular and cellular levels to whole organism, population, ecosystem, or landscape levels. The statistical methods employed to examine these impacts will reflect the level of organization and the measure...
Toxicants in aquatic organisms may impact a variety of responses including hatching, survival, growth, deformity, and reproduction. These responses have a hierarchical relationship since survival is only possible for hatched organisms and deformity is only possible if organisms survive. Linear models and generalized linear models have been widely u...
Experiments with relatively high doses are often used to predict risks at appreciably lower doses.A point of departure (PoD) can be calculated as the dose associated with a specified moderate response level that is often in the range of experimental doses considered. A linear extrapolation to lower doses often follows.An alternative to the PoD meth...
The impact of exchanges and client-therapist alliance of online therapy text exchanges were compared to previously published results in face-to-face therapy, and the moderating effects of four participant factors found significant in previously published face-to-face studies were investigated using statistical mixed-effect modeling analytic techniq...
Environmental toxicology addresses the potential adverse impacts of toxicants on the function of organisms in the environment. This impact could be evaluated ranging from the molecular level to species interactions at an ecosystem function level. A historic context for environmental toxicology is introduced with connections between toxicity tests a...
Water is the key to life, and aquatic toxicology evaluates the potential adverse outcomes associated with exposure to contaminated waters. These adverse outcomes can be observed at all trophic levels and can be framed at differing levels of ecosystem function. Statistical analysis of concentration-response relationships provides one foundation for...
Background. Health literacy, the set of skills for locating, understanding, and using health-related information, is associated with various health outcomes through health behaviors and health care service use. While health literacy has great potential for addressing health disparities stemming from the differing educational attainment in diverse p...
Effluents may contain chemicals that impact the mortality, growth, or reproduction of organisms in aquatic systems. A common endpoint analyzed in reproduction toxicology is the total young produced by organisms exposed to toxicants. In the present study, we propose using two Bayesian hierarchical models to analyze the brood‐specific reproduction co...
Cells exist in an environment in which they are simultaneously exposed to a number of viral challenges. In some cases, infection by one virus may preclude infection by other viruses. Under the assumption of independent times until infection by two viruses, a procedure is presented to estimate the infectivity rates along with the time window during...
Risk factors for hip fracture in Japanese older populations are understudied compared with Western countries arguably due to the relatively lower prevalence rates in Japan. Nationally representative data from the Nihon University Japanese Longitudinal Study of Aging were analyzed using logistic regression to examine possible risk factors of hip fra...
Chemicals in aquatic systems may impact a variety of endpoints including mortality, growth, or reproduction. Clearly, growth or reproduction will only be observed in organisms that survive. Because it is common to observe mortality in studies focusing on the reproduction of organisms, especially in higher concentration conditions, the resulting obs...
A survey of Ohio nursing homes was conducted in 2007 to examine whether injury rates were related to facility characteristics and availability of safety equipment. The median rate of injury in the 898 facilities was 5.7 injuries per 100 workers per year. Although 95% of the facilities had written resident lift-ing policies, only 22% of these were z...
Effectively and accurately assessing the toxicity of chemicals and their impact on the environment continues to be an important concern in ecotoxicology. Single experiments conducted by a particular laboratory commonly serve as the basis of toxicity risk assessment. These laboratories often have a long history of conducting experiments using partic...
Purpose of the study:
A novel logistic regression tree-based method was applied to identify fall risk factors and possible interaction effects of those risk factors.
Design and methods:
A nationally representative sample of American older adults aged 65 years and older (N = 9,592) in the Health and Retirement Study 2004 and 2006 modules was used...
Quantitative risk assessment proceeds by first estimating a dose-response model and then inverting this model to estimate the dose that corresponds to some prespecified level of response. The parametric form of the dose-response model often plays a large role in determining this dose. Consequently, the choice of the proper model is a major source o...
The fish toxicity assay most commonly used to establish chronic effects is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 210, fish early-life stage test. However, the authors are not aware of any systematic analysis of the experimental design or statistical characteristics of the test since the test guideline was adopted nearly...
An optimal experimental design combines high-quality parameter estimation with efficient use of resources. This paper proposes
a new method for heuristic optimization of experimental designs in the presence of variable sampling costs. The method finds
the inexpensive designs with desirable statistical qualities and provides substantial insight rega...
Objective: This study identifies fall risk factors in an understudied population of older people who receive community-based care services. Method: Data were collected from enrollees of Ohio’s Medicaid home- and community-based waiver program (preadmission screening system providing options and resources today [PASSPORT]). A total of 23,182 partici...
Background/Question/Methods: If conservation efforts are to succeed in the long-term, the public majority must be scientifically and environmentally literate. Yet, environmental literacy necessitates awareness of and empathy towards nature, and in a time when the majority of the human population resides in urban and suburban environments, many peop...
Smaller organisms may have too little tissue to allow assaying as individuals. To get a sufficient sample for assaying, a collection of smaller individual organisms is pooled together to produce a simple observation for modeling and analysis. When a dataset contains a mix of pooled and individual organisms, the variances of the observations are not...
Endpoints in aquatic toxicity tests can be measured using a variety of measurement scales including dichotomous (survival), continuous (growth) and count (number of young). A distribution is assumed for an endpoint and analyses proceed accordingly. In certain situations, the assumed distribution may be incorrect and this may lead to incorrect stati...
The combination of information from diverse sources is a common task encountered in computational statistics. A popular label for analyses involving the combination of results from independent studies is meta-analysis. The goal of the methodology is to bring together the results of different studies, reanalyze the disparate results within the conte...
The rate of lost-time sprains and strains in private nursing homes is over three times the national average, and for back injuries, almost four times the national average. The Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC) has sponsored interventions that were preferentially promoted to nursing homes in 2000-2001, including training, consultation, and...
We investigated the extent to which the political economy of US states, including the relative power of organized labor, predicts rates of fatal occupational injury.
We described states' political economies with 6 contextual variables measuring social and political conditions: "right-to-work" laws, union membership density, labor grievance rates, s...
Historically, death is the most commonly studied effect in aquatic toxicity tests. These tests typically employ a gradient of concentrations and exposure with more than one organism in a series of replicate chambers in each concentration. Whereas a binomial distribution commonly is employed for such effects, variability may exceed that predicted by...
Worker populations often provide data on adverse responses associated with exposure to potential hazards. The relationship between hazard exposure levels and adverse response can be modeled and then inverted to estimate the exposure associated with some specified response level. One concern is that this endpoint may be sensitive to the concentratio...
Model averaging (MA) has been proposed as a method of accommodating model uncertainty when estimating risk. Although the use
of MA is inherently appealing, little is known about its performance using general modeling conditions. We investigate the
use of MA for estimating excess risk using a Monte Carlo simulation. Dichotomous response data are sim...
The Minimum Data Set (MDS) is a tool used by nursing homes for resident assessment and care planning, indicating facility quality and the extent of residents' care needs. The process by which the MDS is completed by facilities has not been empirically studied. Understanding common strategies and practices for completing the MDS helps further compre...
With the increased availability of toxicological hazard information arising from multiple experimental sources, risk assessors are often confronted with the challenge of synthesizing all available scientific information into an analysis. This analysis is further complicated because significant between-source heterogeneity/lab-to-lab variability is...
Environmental toxicity refers to the impact of a hazard or stressor at all levels of biological organization. This impact can range from molecular and cellular levels to whole organism, population, ecosystem, or landscape levels. The statistical methods employed to examine these impacts will reflect the spectrum of the level of organization and the...
A common goal in environmental risk assessment is description of the hazardous agent's toxic or otherwise-harmful effects, often for comparison with others agents of related structure or exposure. Summary measures are most useful in this regard, as these describe the potency of an agent or some product of an agent on the organism or system under st...
An area of growing importance in quantitative risk analysis concerns the combination of information from diverse sources. A common rubric for combining the results of independent studies is meta-analysis. The goal of the methodology is to bring together results of different studies, reanalyze the disparate results within the context of their common...
Model averaging has been shown to be a useful method for incorporating model uncertainty in quantitative risk estimation. In certain circumstances this technique is computationally complex, requiring sophisticated software to carry out the computation. We introduce software that implements model averaging for risk assessment based upon dichotomous...
Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement received by nursing homes are linked to the care needs of residents in a facility. Thus,
a facility may have an incentive to overestimate the care needs of residents. To evaluate this, a sample of nursing homes
in Ohio was selected, and independent assessors were sent to sampled facilities, and the rating of resi...
A common measure of the relative toxicity is the ratio of median lethal doses for responses estimated in two bioassays. Robertson and Preisler previously proposed a method for constructing a confidence interval for the ratio. The applicability of this technique in common experimental situations, especially those involving small samples, may be ques...
A common measure of the relative toxicity is the ratio of median lethal doses for responses estimated in two bioassays. Robertson and Preisler previously proposed a method for constructing a confidence interval for the ratio. The applicability of this technique in common experimental situations, especially those involving small samples, may be ques...
Selecting the number of observations from each stratum is a primary decision in stratified random sampling design. Typically, allocation schemes aim to minimize or bound the variance associated with estimating some overall population parameter, subject to a limitation on sampling resources. This paper examines the impact of further constraints on a...
Following the relative efficiency comparison of sampling plans excluding certain neighbouring units [See, K., Noble, R.B. and Bailer, J., 2005, Comparisons of relative efficiencies of sampling plans excluding certain neighboring units: a simulation study. Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, in press.], we now compute the inclusion pr...
Physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models are used in mode-of-action based risk and safety assessments to estimate internal dosimetry in animals and humans. When used in risk assessment, these models can provide a basis for extrapolating between species, doses, and exposure routes or for justifying nondefault values for uncertainty factor...
The operating characteristics of different statistical tests for evaluating multiple-group variance equality were examined using a simulation study. Normal-theory tests including Bartlett's test, Levene's test and Hartley's test were compared to randomization tests in this study. The randomization tests maintained nominal Type I error rates over a...
Many biological subdisciplines that regularly assess dose-response relationships have identified an evolutionarily conserved process in which a low dose of a stressful stimulus activates an adaptive response that increases the resistance of the cell or organism to a moderate to severe level of stress. Due to a lack of frequent interaction among sci...
Ecological and environmental studies frequently involve work in settings where some physical conditions influence the effectiveness of standard sampling plans. These studies may require expensive and time-consuming sampling processes. These conditions motivate researchers to find sampling plans that provide the highest precision at the lowest cost....
Model averaging (MA) has been proposed as a method of accounting for model uncertainty in benchmark dose (BMD) estimation. The technique has been used to average BMD dose estimates derived from dichotomous dose-response experiments, microbial dose-response experiments, as well as observational epidemiological studies. While MA is a promising tool f...