February, 2003
© 2001, 2003 Scott S. Emerson M.D., Ph.D.
 Nonparametric Models: 14
The Problem
Conditions under which an intervention might be expected to affect many aspects of a probability distribution (cont.)
Example 2: Treatment of hypertension
·Hypertension has multiple causes
·Any given intervention might treat only subgroups of subjects (and subgroup membership is a latent variable)
·The treated population has a mixture distribution
-(and note that we might expect greater variance in the group with the lower mean)