Medical Applications of Finite Mixture Models

The book shows how to model heterogeneity in medical research with covariate adjusted finite mixture models. The areas of application include epidemiology, gene expression data, disease mapping, meta-analysis, neurophysiology and pharmacology. After an informal introduction the book provides and summarizes the mathematical background necessary to understand the algorithms. The emphasis of the book is on a variety of medical applications such as gene expression data, meta-analysis and population pharmacokinetics. These applications are discussed in detail using real data from the medical literature. The book offers an R package which enables the reader to use the methods for his/her needs.