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Dear Allstat Community,

In a recent post on my blog, I demonstrated how logarithmic transformation
can linearize a target-predictor relationship.

http://wp.me/p3bFTa-4R


I would much appreciate your help with 2 sets of difficulties.

1) If you plot the residuals against the fitted values of ln(DDT), you will
find that the variance decreases. I am encountering 2 problems:
1a) I can't find a good transformation to remove this trend in the variance.

1b) I have already transformed the model once. I fear that transforming it
again would make it difficult to make inferences on the quantities and
obtain an easily understandable interpretation of the quantities.



2) At the end of the blog post, I used the estimated decay rate to
calculate the half-life. I would like to calculate a confidence interval
for the half-life. Even if I (incorrectly) set aside the non-constant
variance that ruins my estimation of the standard errors, I don't know how
to calculate a confidence interval for the half-life, since the variance
calculation would start off as


Var[ln(0.5)/lambda] = Var[half-life],


where lambda is the random variable in this case; its standard error is
given in my regression output for beta1. Half-life is not a linear
combination of lambda, so the variance cannot be nicely calculated with the
usual rules of variance. Thus, I don't know how to calculate the variance
of half-life and, hence, the confidence interval for half-life. (I fully
understand that the standard error for beta1/lambda is not good, so I
welcome any suggestion for overcoming both of these problems
simultaneously.)


I would much appreciate your insights on how I can overcome these problems.


Thank you for your time.


Eric


________________________
Eric Cai
The Chemical Statistician
http://chemicalstatistician.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @chemstateric
https://twitter.com/chemstateric

M.Sc.
Statistics
University of Toronto

B.Sc. with Distinction
Chemistry and Mathematics
Simon Fraser University

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