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<b>intRinsic</b>: An <i>R</i> Package for Model-Based Estimation of the Intrinsic Dimension of a Dataset

This article illustrates intRinsic, an R package that implements novel state-of-the-art likelihood-based estimators of the intrinsic dimension of a dataset, an essential quantity for most dimensionality reduction techniques. In order to make these novel estimators easily accessible, the package contains a small number of high-level functions that rely on a broader set of efficient, low-level routines. Generally speaking, intRinsic encompasses models that fall into two categories: homogeneous and heterogeneous intrinsic dimension estimators. The first category contains the two nearest neighbors estimator, a method derived from the distributional properties of the ratios of the distances between each data point and its first two closest neighbors. The functions dedicated to this method carry out inference under both the frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. In the second category, we find the heterogeneous intrinsic dimension algorithm, a Bayesian mixture model for which an efficient Gibbs sampler is implemented. After presenting the theoretical background, we demonstrate the performance of the models on simulated datasets. This way, we can facilitate the exposition by immediately assessing the validity of the results. Then, we employ the package to study the intrinsic dimension of the Alon dataset, obtained from a famous microarray experiment. Finally, we show how the estimation of homogeneous and heterogeneous intrinsic dimensions allows us to gain valuable insights into the topological structure of a dataset.

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Broken Stick Model for Irregular Longitudinal Data

Many longitudinal studies collect data that have irregular observation times, often requiring the application of linear mixed models with time-varying outcomes. This paper presents an alternative that splits the quantitative analysis into two steps. The first step converts irregularly observed data into a set of repeated measures through the broken stick model. The second step estimates the parameters of scientific interest from the repeated measurements at the subject level. The broken stick model approximates each subject's trajectory by a series of connected straight lines. The breakpoints, specified by the user, divide the time axis into consecutive intervals common to all subjects. Specification of the model requires just three variables: time, measurement and subject. The model is a special case of the linear mixed model, with time as a linear B-spline and subject as the grouping factor. The main assumptions are: Subjects are exchangeable, trajectories between consecutive breakpoints are straight, random effects follow a multivariate normal distribution, and unobserved data are missing at random. The R package brokenstick v2.5.0 offers tools to calculate, predict, impute and visualize broken stick estimates. The package supports two optimization methods, including options to constrain the variance-covariance matrix of the random effects. We demonstrate six applications of the model: Detection of critical periods, estimation of the time-to-time correlations, profile analysis, curve interpolation, multiple imputation and personalized prediction of future outcomes by curve matching.

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