No Arabic abstract
Access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) has transformed the face of HIV infection from a fatal to a chronic disease. However, ART is also known for its side effects. Studies have reported that ART is associated with depressive symptomatology. Large-scale HIV clinical databases with individuals longitudinal depression records, ART medications, and clinical characteristics offer researchers unprecedented opportunities to study the effects of ART drugs on depression over time. We develop BAGEL, a Bayesian graphical model to investigate longitudinal effects of ART drugs on a range of depressive symptoms while adjusting for participants demographic, behavior, and clinical characteristics, and taking into account the heterogeneous population through a Bayesian nonparametric prior. We evaluate BAGEL through simulation studies. Application to a dataset from the Womens Interagency HIV Study yields interpretable and clinically useful results. BAGEL not only can improve our understanding of ART drugs effects on disparate depression symptoms, but also has clinical utility in guiding informed and effective treatment selection to facilitate precision medicine in HIV.
Although combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) is highly effective in suppressing viral load for people with HIV (PWH), many ART agents may exacerbate central nervous system (CNS)-related adverse effects including depression. Therefore, understanding the effects of ART drugs on the CNS function, especially mental health, can help clinicians personalize medicine with less adverse effects for PWH and prevent them from discontinuing their ART to avoid undesirable health outcomes and increased likelihood of HIV transmission. The emergence of electronic health records offers researchers unprecedented access to HIV data including individuals mental health records, drug prescriptions, and clinical information over time. However, modeling such data is very challenging due to high-dimensionality of the drug combination space, the individual heterogeneity, and sparseness of the observed drug combinations. We develop a Bayesian nonparametric approach to learn drug combination effect on mental health in PWH adjusting for socio-demographic, behavioral, and clinical factors. The proposed method is built upon the subset-tree kernel method that represents drug combinations in a way that synthesizes known regimen structure into a single mathematical representation. It also utilizes a distance-dependent Chinese restaurant process to cluster heterogeneous population while taking into account individuals treatment histories. We evaluate the proposed approach through simulation studies, and apply the method to a dataset from the Womens Interagency HIV Study, yielding interpretable and promising results. Our method has clinical utility in guiding clinicians to prescribe more informed and effective personalized treatment based on individuals treatment histories and clinical characteristics.
We introduce a numerically tractable formulation of Bayesian joint models for longitudinal and survival data. The longitudinal process is modelled using generalised linear mixed models, while the survival process is modelled using a parametric general hazard structure. The two processes are linked by sharing fixed and random effects, separating the effects that play a role at the time scale from those that affect the hazard scale. This strategy allows for the inclusion of non-linear and time-dependent effects while avoiding the need for numerical integration, which facilitates the implementation of the proposed joint model. We explore the use of flexible parametric distributions for modelling the baseline hazard function which can capture the basic shapes of interest in practice. We discuss prior elicitation based on the interpretation of the parameters. We present an extensive simulation study, where we analyse the inferential properties of the proposed models, and illustrate the trade-off between flexibility, sample size, and censoring. We also apply our proposal to two real data applications in order to demonstrate the adaptability of our formulation both in univariate time-to-event data and in a competing risks framework. The methodology is implemented in rstan.
Incorporating preclinical animal data, which can be regarded as a special kind of historical data, into phase I clinical trials can improve decision making when very little about human toxicity is known. In this paper, we develop a robust hierarchical modelling approach to leverage animal data into new phase I clinical trials, where we bridge across non-overlapping, potentially heterogeneous patient subgroups. Translation parameters are used to bring both historical and contemporary data onto a common dosing scale. This leads to feasible exchangeability assumptions that the parameter vectors, which underpin the dose-toxicity relationship per study, are assumed to be drawn from a common distribution. Moreover, human dose-toxicity parameter vectors are assumed to be exchangeable either with the standardised, animal study-specific parameter vectors, or between themselves. Possibility of non-exchangeability for each parameter vector is considered to avoid inferences for extreme subgroups being overly influenced by the other. We illustrate the proposed approach with several trial data examples, and evaluate the operating characteristics of our model compared with several alternatives in a simulation study. Numerical results show that our approach yields robust inferences in circumstances, where data from multiple sources are inconsistent and/or the bridging assumptions are incorrect.
Statistical techniques used in air pollution modelling usually lack the possibility to understand which predictors affect air pollution in which functional form; and are not able to regress on exceedances over certain thresholds imposed by authorities directly. The latter naturally induce conditional quantiles and reflect the seriousness of particular events. In the present paper we focus on this important aspect by developing quantile regression models further. We propose a general Bayesian effect selection approach for additive quantile regression within a highly interpretable framework. We place separate normal beta prime spike and slab priors on the scalar importance parameters of effect parts and implement a fast Gibbs sampling scheme. Specifically, it enables to study quantile-specific covariate effects, allows these covariates to be of general functional form using additive predictors, and facilitates the analysts decision whether an effect should be included linearly, non-linearly or not at all in the quantiles of interest. In a detailed analysis on air pollution data in Madrid (Spain) we find the added value of modelling extreme nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations and how thresholds are driven differently by several climatological variables and traffic as a spatial proxy. Our results underpin the need of enhanced statistical models to support short-term decisions and enable local authorities to mitigate or even prevent exceedances of NO2 concentration limits.
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a popular magnetic resonance imaging technique used to characterize microstructural changes in the brain. DTI studies quantify the diffusion of water molecules in a voxel using an estimated 3x3 symmetric positive definite diffusion tensor matrix. Statistical analysis of DTI data is challenging because the data are positive definite matrices. Matrix-variate information is often summarized by a univariate quantity, such as the fractional anisotropy (FA), leading to a loss of information. Furthermore, DTI analyses often ignore the spatial association of neighboring voxels, which can lead to imprecise estimates. Although the spatial modeling literature is abundant, modeling spatially dependent positive definite matrices is challenging. To mitigate these issues, we propose a matrix-variate Bayesian semiparametric mixture model, where the positive definite matrices are distributed as a mixture of inverse Wishart distributions with the spatial dependence captured by a Markov model for the mixture component labels. Conjugacy and the double Metropolis-Hastings algorithm result in fast and elegant Bayesian computing. Our simulation study shows that the proposed method is more powerful than non-spatial methods. We also apply the proposed method to investigate the effect of cocaine use on brain structure. The contribution of our work is to provide a novel statistical inference tool for DTI analysis by extending spatial statistics to matrix-variate data.