In genetic association studies, Mendelian Randomization (MR) is a popular tool for inferring causal relationships between traits using genetic variants as instrumental variables. Recent methods have been proposed as tools that can infer the causal direction between two phenotypes including MR Steiger, bidirectional MR, causal direction-ratio, causal direction-Egger, and causal direction-GLS....
Heart transplantation is widely regarded as the gold standard for the treatment of end-stage heart failure. However, shortages of donor hearts necessitate the implementation of waiting lists and allocation algorithms. The German Transplantation Law stipulates the allocation of donor hearts based on urgency of and the benefit from a transplantation. This can be summarized into a single score,...
Background: Childhood immunization influences directly and indirectly fourteen out of the seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs). Timely receipt of vaccines protects children from deadly diseases and increases the overall future productivity of the population. With the largest and most heterogeneous population of under-five children, the delay in receiving polio vaccination has not...
Mixed-effects models (MEMs) are widely used in epidemiology to analyze data not being independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) like longitudinal data. However, MEMs rely on parametric assumptions and require predefined interactions among predictors. In contrast, machine learning (ML) methods such as random forests (RF) assume i.i.d. data but are more flexible in capturing nonlinear...
Assessing micronutrient status is essential in nutritional research (Allen, 2025) and typically involves estimating the population wide prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies using biomarker data collected across multiple regions. In such studies, several biomarkers are commonly analyzed to estimate the prevalence of any deficiency, defined as the probability that at least one of the...
