Regression Modeling Strategies: With Applications to Linear Models, Logistic Regression, and Survival Analysis (Springer Series in Statistics) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Frank Harrell is a Professor who does a lot of consulting in medical research. This book covers a wide variety of topics in regression analysis including many advanced techniques including data reduction, smoothing techniques, variable selection, transformations, shrinkage methods, tree-based methods and resampling. But note the title "Regression Modeling Strategies". Unlike most advanced texts in regression this book emphasizes modeling strategies. So the focus is on things like variable selection and other techniques to avoid overfitting models and diagnostics to look for violations in assumptions such as variance homogeneity or normality and independence of residuals, or stability problems like colinearity.
The book covers an extensive collection of modern techniques for exploratory data analysis. Inferential methods are also considered and he deals appropriately with important issues (particularly for medical research) such as imputation of missing values. Many examples are considered and illustrated in S-PLUS.
Harrell also provides many rules of thumb based on his own experience building models. A lot of the techniques are illustrated using data from the Titanic where it is interesting to see which factors affected the probability of survival. My only disappointment was that there is perhaps too much emphasis on this one particular data set.
A standard regression text would be expected to include linear and nonlinear regression. Harrell goes much deeper including nonparametric regression, logistic regression and survival models (e.g. the Cox proportional hazards model).


Click Here to see more reviews about: Regression Modeling Strategies: With Applications to Linear Models, Logistic Regression, and Survival Analysis (Springer Series in Statistics)

Many texts are excellent sources of knowledge about individual statistical tools, but the art of data analysis is about choosing and using multiple tools. Instead of presenting isolated techniques, this text emphasizes problem solving strategies that address the many issues arising when developing multivariable models using real data and not standard textbook examples. It includes imputation methods for dealing with missing data effectively, methods for dealing with nonlinear relationships and for making the estimation of transformations a formal part of the modeling process, methods for dealing with "too many variables to analyze and not enough observations," and powerful model validation techniques based on the bootstrap. This text realistically deals with model uncertainty and its effects on inference to achieve "safe data mining".

Get 20% OFF

Click here for more information about Regression Modeling Strategies: With Applications to Linear Models, Logistic Regression, and Survival Analysis (Springer Series in Statistics)