the book provides a brief introduction to SAS, SPSS, and BMDP, along with their use in performing ANOVA. The book also has a chapter devoted to experimental designs and the corresponding ANOVA. In terms of coverage, a nice feature of the book is the inclusion of a chapter on  nite population models—typically not found in books on experimental designs and ANOVA. Several appendixes are given at the end of the book discussing some of the standard distributions, the Satterthwaite approximation, rules for computing the sums of squares, degrees of freedom, expected mean squares, and so forth. The exercises at the end of each chapter contain a number of numerical problems. Some of my quibbles about the book are the following. At times, it simply gives expressions without adequate motivation or examples. A reader who is not already familiar with ANOVA techniques will wonder as to the relevance of some of the expressions. Just to give an example, the quantity “sum of squares due to a contrast” is de ned on page 65. The algebraic property that the sums of squares due to a set of a ƒ 1 orthogonal contrasts will add up to the sum of squares due to an effect having a ƒ 1 df is then stated. Given the level of the book, discussion of such a property appears to be irrelevant. I did not see this property used anywhere in the book; neither did I see the sum of squares due to a contrast explicitly used or mentioned later in the book. Examples in which the one-way model is adequate are mentioned only after introducing the model and the assumptions, and the examples are buried inside the remarks (in small print) following the model. This is also the case with the two-way model with interaction (Chap. 4). The authors indicate in the preface that the remarks are mostly meant to include results to be kept out of the main body of the text. I believe that good examples should be the starting point for introducing ANOVA models. The authors present the analysis of  xed, random, and mixed models simultaneously. Motivating examples that distinguish between these scenarios should have been made the highlight of the presentation in each chapter rather than deferred to the later part of the chapter under “worked out examples” or buried within the remarks. The authors discuss transformations to correct lack of normality and lack of homoscedasticity (Sec. 2.22). However, these are not illustrated with any real examples. Regarding tests concerning the departure from the model assumptions, formal tests are presented in some detail; however, graphical procedures are only very brie y mentioned under a remark. I consider this to be a glaring omission. Consequently, I would be somewhat hesitant to recommend this book to anyone interested in actual data analysis using ANOVA unless the application is such that one of the standard models (along with the standard assumptions) is known to be adequate and diagnostic checks are not called for. Obviously, this is an unlikely scenario in most applications. The preceding criticisms aside, I can see myself consulting this book to refer to an ANOVA table, to look up an expected value or test statistic under a random or mixed-effects model, or to refer to the use of SAS, SPSS, or BMDP for performing ANOVA. The book is indeed an excellent source of reference for the ANOVA based on  xed, random, and mixed-effects models.

Linear Models in Statistics

This autobiography of mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century, tells a story rich with amazingly prophetic speculations and peppered with lively anecdotes. As a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1944 on, Ulam helped to precipitate some of the most dramatic changes of the postwar world. He was among the first to use and advocate computers for scientific research, originated ideas for the nuclear propulsion of space vehicles, and made fundamental contributions to many of today's most challenging mathematical projects. With his wide-ranging interests, Ulam never emphasized the importance of his contributions to the research that resulted in the hydrogen bomb. Now Daniel Hirsch and William Mathews reveal the true story of Ulam's pivotal role in the making of the 'Super,' in their historical introduction to this behind-the-scenes look at the minds and ideas that ushered in the nuclear age. It includes an epilogue by Francoise Ulam and Jan Mycielski that sheds new light on Ulam's character and mathematical originality.

Adventures of a mathematician

Generalised linear models, with "log" link and either Poisson or negative binomial errors, are commonly used for relating accident rates to explanatory variables. This paper adds to the toolkit for such models. It describes how confidence intervals (for example, for the true accident rate at given flows) and prediction intervals (for example, for the number of accidents at a new site with given flows) can be produced using spreadsheet technology.

Confidence and prediction intervals for generalised linear accident models

The noise in daily infection counts of an epidemic should be super-Poissonian due to intrinsic epidemiological and administrative clustering. Here, we use this clustering to classify the official national SARS-CoV-2 daily infection counts and check for infection counts that are unusually anti-clustered. We adopt a one-parameter model of ϕ i ' infections per cluster, dividing any daily count n i into n i / ϕ i ' 'clusters', for 'country' i. We assume that n i / ϕ i ' on a given day j is drawn from a Poisson distribution whose mean is robustly estimated from the four neighbouring days, and calculate the inferred Poisson probability P i j ' of the observation. The P i j ' values should be uniformly distributed. We find the value ϕ i that minimises the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance from a uniform distribution. We investigate the (ϕ i , N i ) distribution, for total infection count N i . We consider consecutive count sequences above a threshold of 50 daily infections. We find that most of the daily infection count sequences are inconsistent with a Poissonian model. Most are found to be consistent with the ϕ i model. The 28-, 14- and 7-day least noisy sequences for several countries are best modelled as sub-Poissonian, suggesting a distinct epidemiological family. The 28-day least noisy sequence of Algeria has a preferred model that is strongly sub-Poissonian, with ϕ i 28 0.1 . Tajikistan, Turkey, Russia, Belarus, Albania, United Arab Emirates and Nicaragua have preferred models that are also sub-Poissonian, with ϕ i 28 0.5 . A statistically significant (P τ < 0.05) correlation was found between the lack of media freedom in a country, as represented by a high Reporters sans frontieres Press Freedom Index (PFI2020), and the lack of statistical noise in the country's daily counts. The ϕ i model appears to be an effective detector of suspiciously low statistical noise in the national SARS-CoV-2 daily infection counts.

Anti-clustering in the national SARS-CoV-2 daily infection counts.

COVID-19 is currently become a global problem, including in Jakarta, Indonesia. There have been many approaches to predict COVID-19 occurrence, including the forecasting approach. However, the traditional forecasting method, particularly machine learning, often does not consider the condition of the data, although it has forms of the count, such as the number of cases. This study employs an autoregression model using Poisson distribution in predicting the COVID-19 future cases, namely the positive and recovery number. We compare the Poisson Autoregression with several well-known forecasting methods, namely ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing, BATS, and Prophet. This study found that Poisson Autoregression could create an accurate prediction with MAPE below 20% and tend to follows the actual data for the next 8 to 14 days to the future. Thus, this approach can forecast the future cases of COVID-19 and other cases that use count data in Jakarta, like the number of citizen complaints or transportation context.

Forecasting of COVID-19 Cases in Jakarta using Poisson Autoregression

Motivated by the current Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which is due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the important problem of forecasting daily deaths and cumulative deaths, this paper examines the construction of prediction regions or intervals under the Poisson regression model and for an over-dispersed Poisson regression model. For the Poisson regression model, several prediction regions are developed and their performance are compared through simulation studies. The methods are applied to the problem of forecasting daily and cumulative deaths in the United States (US) due to COVID-19. To examine their performance relative to what actually happened, daily deaths data until May 15th were used to forecast cumulative deaths by June 1st. It was observed that there is over-dispersion in the observed data relative to the Poisson regression model. An over-dispersed Poisson regression model is therefore proposed. This new model builds on frailty ideas in Survival Analysis and over-dispersion is quantified through an additional parameter. The Poisson regression model is a hidden model in this over-dispersed Poisson regression model and obtains as a limiting case when the over-dispersion parameter increases to infinity. A prediction region for the cumulative number of US deaths due to COVID-19 by July 16th, given the data until July 2nd, is presented. Finally, the paper discusses limitations of proposed procedures and mentions open research problems, as well as the dangers and pitfalls when forecasting on a long horizon, with focus on this pandemic where events, both foreseen and unforeseen, could have huge impacts on point predictions and prediction regions.

Prediction Regions for Poisson and Over-Dispersed Poisson Regression Models with Applications to Forecasting Number of Deaths during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper provides a review of the literature regarding methods for constructing prediction intervals for counting variables, with particular focus on those whose distributions are Poisson or derived from Poisson and with an over‐dispersion property. Independent and identically distributed models and regression models are both considered. The motivating problem for this review is that of predicting the number of daily and cumulative cases or deaths attributable to COVID‐19 at a future date.This article is categorized under: Applications of Computational Statistics > Clinical Trials Statistical Learning and Exploratory Methods of the Data Sciences > Modeling Methods Statistical Models > Generalized Linear Models [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of WIREs: Computational Statistics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Benjamin Lieberman

Papers

Prediction Regions for Poisson and Over-Dispersed Poisson Regression Models with Applications to Forecasting Number of Deaths during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Prediction intervals for Poisson‐based regression models

Prediction Regions for Poisson and Over-Dispersed Poisson Regression Models with Applications to Forecasting Number of Deaths during the COVID-19 Pandemic