Semiparametric Growth-Curve Modeling in Hierarchical, Longitudinal Studies
层级纵向研究中的半参数生长曲线建模
Modeling of growth (or decay) curves arises in many fields such as microbiology, epidemiology, marketing, and econometrics. Parametric forms like Logistic and Gompertz are often used for modeling such monotonic patterns. While useful for compact description, the real-life growth curves rarely follow these parametric forms perfectly. Therefore, the curve estimation methods that strike a balance between prior information in the parametric form and fidelity with the observed…