What The...
What's Up? I'm a statistician at the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research on the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus. I also consult one day a week in the U-M Flint Office of Research. I have a Masters Degree in Applied Statistics from the U of M Department of Statistics. Interested parties can check out my CV here. You can also drop me an email!

Current Courses
No current courses.

Linear Mixed Models: A Practical Guide using Statistical Software
I have written a book entitled Linear Mixed Models: A Practical Guide Using Statistical Software with two colleagues here at U of M (Kathy Welch and Andrzej Galecki). Click on the title to access electronic versions of the data files and syntax discussed in the book. The book was published by Chapman Hall/CRC Press in Boca Raton, Florida (click on the link for ordering details).

Peer-reviewed Articles
1. West, B.T. (In Press). Statistical and Methodological Issues in the Analysis of Complex Sample Survey Data: Practical Guidance for Trauma Researchers. Journal of Traumatic Stress.
2. West, B.T. and Lamsal, M. (In Press). A New Application of Linear Modeling in the Prediction of College Football Bowl Outcomes and the Development of Team Ratings. Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
3. McCabe, S.E., Cranford, J.A., and West, B.T. (In press). Trends in prescription drug abuse and dependence, co-occurrence with other substance use disorders, and treatment utilization: Results from two national surveys. Addictive Behaviors.
4. Gonzalez, H.M., Croghan, T.W., West, B.T., Williams, D.R., Underwood, W., Taylor, R.J., Hinton, L., and Jackson, J.S. (In Press). Antidepressant Use among Blacks and Whites in the United States. Psychiatric Services.
5. Kerber, K.A., Meurer, W., and West, B.T. (In Press). Dizziness Presentations in U.S. Emergency Departments, 1995-2004. Journal of Academic Medicine.
6. West, B.T., Berglund, P., and Heeringa, S.G. (In Press). A Closer Examination of Subpopulation Analysis of Complex Sample Survey Data. The Stata Journal.
7. Orom, H., Penner, L.A., West, B.T., Downs, T.M., Rayford, W., Underwood III, W. (In Press). Personality Predicts Prostate Cancer Treatment Decision-Making Difficulty and Satisfaction. Psycho-Oncology.
8. Davis, R.L., Therrien, B.A., and West, B.T. (In Press). Cue Conditions and Wayfinding in Younger and Older Women. Research in Gerontological Nursing.
9. West, B.T. A Simple and Flexible Rating Method for Predicting Success in the NCAA Basketball Tournament: Updated Results from 2007. Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Special NESSIS 2007 Issue. Vol 4: No. 2, Article 8, 2008.
10. West, B.T. A Simple and Flexible Rating Method for Predicting Success in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Vol. 2: No. 3, Article 3, 2006. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2003 Hawaii International Conference on Statistics and Related Fields (HICS), and the paper has been revised and updated with results from the 2006 NCAA Tournament for publication in JQAS. Readers can click here for the updated R code used to perform the simulation discussed in the paper. Thoughts and comments are welcome!
11. Kavoussi, S.K., West, B.T., Taylor, G.W., and Lebovic, D.I. (In Press). Periodontal Disease and Endometriosis: Analysis of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Data. Fertility and Sterility.
12. McCabe, S. E., West, B.T., Morales, M., Cranford, J.A., and Boyd, C.J. Does early onset of non-medical use predict prescription drug abuse and dependence? Results from a national study. Addiction. Vol. 102 (2007), 1920-1930.
13. Gonzalez, H.M, Whitfield, K.E., West, B.T., Williams, D.R., Lichtenberg, P., and Jackson, J.S. (2007). Modified-Symbol Digit Modalities Test for African Americans, Caribbean Black Americans and Non-Latino Whites: Nationally Representative Normative Data from the National Survey of American Life. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology. 22: 605-613.
14. McCabe, S. E., Brower, K.J., West, B.T., Nelson, T., and Wechsler, H. Trends in nonmedical use of anabolic steroids by U.S. college students: Results from four national surveys. Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Vol. 90, October 2007: pages 243-251.
15. McCabe, S. E., West, B.T., and Wechsler, H. (2007). Trends in Non-Medical Use of Prescription Drugs among U.S. College Students from 1993 to 2001. Addiction. Vol. 102, 455-465.
16. McCabe, S. E., West, B.T., and Wechsler, H. Alcohol use disorders and nonmedical use of prescription drugs among U.S. college students. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Vol. 68, No. 4, July 2007: 543-547.
17. Zhao, L., West, B.T., Hayman, J.A., Lyons, S., Cease, K., and Kong, Feng-Ming. High Radiation Dose May Reduce the Negative Effect of Large Gross Tumor Volume in Patients with Medically Inoperable Early-Stage Non-small Cell Lung Cancer. International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics. 2007 May 1; 68(1): 103-110.
18. Wu, T., and West, B.T. Mammography Stages of Adoption and Decision Balance among Asian Indian and Filipino American Women. Cancer Nursing. Vol. 30, No. 5, 2007.
19. Padbury, A. D., Tolga, T., Taba, M., Ealba, E., West, B.T., Burney, R., Gauger, P., Giannobile, W.V., and McCauley, L.K. The Impact of Primary Hyperparathyroidism on the Oral Cavity. Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Vol. 91, No. 9, July 2006: pages 3439-3445.
20. Vitzthum, V.J., Spielvogel, H., Thornburg, J., and West, B.T. A Prospective Study of Early Pregnancy Loss in Humans. Fertility and Sterility. Vol. 86, No. 2, August 2006: 373-379.
21. Wu, T., West, B.T., Chen, Y., Hergert, C. Health Beliefs and Practices Related to Breast Cancer Screening in Filipino, Chinese, and Asian Indian Women. Cancer Detection and Prevention. No. 30, February 2006.
22. Wise, C.G., Bahl, V., Mitchell, R., West, B.T., Carli, T. Population-Based Medical and Disease Management: An Evaluation of Cost and Quality. Disease Management. Vol. 9, No 1 (January), 2006.
23. Gonzalez, H., West, B.T., Underwood III, Willie. PSA Testing in Office-Based Clinics: Are We Testing As Much As We Think? Journal of American College Surgeons. Vol. 201, No 6 (December), 2005: 906-911.
24. Green, C.R., Ndao-Brumblay, S.K., West, B.T., Washington, T. Prescription Opioid Analgesic Availability in Minority and Caucasian Michigan Neighborhoods. Journal of Pain, Vol 6, No 10 (October), 2005: pp. 689-699.
25. Spencer, A.U., Neaga, A., West, B.T., Safran, J., Brown, P., Btaiche, I., Kuzma-OReilly, B., and Teitelbaum, D.H. Pediatric Short Bowel Syndrome: Redefining Predictors of Success. Annals of Surgery. 242(3): 403-412, September 2005.

Additional Articles
1. West, B.T., Berglund, P., and Heeringa, S.H. Alternative Approaches to Subclass Analysis of Complex Sample Survey Data. Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Statistical Meetings. For more information on the methods for point estimation and variance estimation in the paper (and Appendix A), please click here. To see the software code used in the paper (Appendix B), please click here. Click here to see Figure 1. Finally, click here to see the SPSS and Sudaan text from Section 7.
2. Rezmierski, V., Bard., M., and West, B. (2006). Final Report of the Computer Incident Factor Analysis and Categorization (CIFAC) Project, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/csd4455.pdf.
3. West, B.T. Pros and Cons of Free Statistical Consulting in an Academic Setting. The Statistical Consultant (Newsletter of the Consulting Section of the American Statistical Association). July 2006: Volume 23, No. 2.
4. "Spatial Analysis of a Small Area Problem" (w/ Ed Rothman). I was fortunate enough to present this paper (my Honors Thesis) at the 2002 HICS.

Teaching
I teach courses, workshops, and seminars for CSCAR, ISR, and various other departments around campus. These include:
-Issues in Analysis of Complex Sample Survey Data (CSCAR)
-Introduction to Stata (CSCAR)
-Applications of HLM (CSCAR)
-Introduction to SPSS (CSCAR)
-Intermediate Topics in SPSS (CSCAR)
-Logistic Regression and Related Techniques (CSCAR)
-Statistical Analysis with R (CSCAR)
-SurvMeth 614: Analysis of Complex Sample Survey Data (ISR Summer Program)
-Statistical Analysis with Missing Data (ICPSR)
-Biostatistics for Grant Development (Radiation Oncology @ Medical School)
-Introduction to SAS for Financial Engineers
-Nursing 598: Statistical Analysis with SPSS (U of M Flint)

For more information on CSCAR workshops, please visit here.

March Madness...
I strongly believe that statistical modeling can be used to predict success in the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. I'm interested in the development of statistical regression models that can be used to predict success, and in the paper above, I present a simple and flexible rating method for predicting success in the NCAA basketball tournament. The paper utilizes a method based on ordinal logistic regression and expectation for prediction. I believe that the RPI is a numerically flawed rating system that receives an unfair amount of weight in selecting and seeding teams for the tournament, and I have shown over the last four years that my models are comparable to or better than the RPI in terms of predicting success in the tournament.

If numerical ratings like the RPI are going to be considered in seeding teams selected for the tournament, the selection committee should focus on the ratings that do the best job of actually predicting success in the tournament, or pre-tournament ratings that correlate very well with actual success. The "best" ratings can be used to identify teams that are likely to do well in the tournament (and thus teams that are most eligible to compete for the national championship). I collect data on RPI ratings, Jeff Sagarin's computer ratings, and the predictors of success that I consider in my models, and then calculate predicted success in the tournament (which can be translated into a rating) based on my models. You can view the final 2008 results (and results from previous years) here. In the 2008 tournament, my predictions were once again found to have a higher correlation with success (0.76) than the RPI ratings (0.63) or the Sagarin ratings (0.64). The adjusted OLRE ratings were found to have the highest correlation with actual success (0.76), but unfortunately for me did not pick Kansas to win (the model-based simulation, however, did, and won a fairly large bracket for me and my Dad!). =) Feedback is more than welcome!

Bowl Madness...
I'm also interested in the possibility that statistical modeling can be used to predict the outcomes of college football bowl games, and in this in-press version of a paper submitted to the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, my colleague Madhur Lamsal and I consider a straightforward application of statistical modeling in determining whether team-level variables were able to predict the actual bowl game outcomes in the recently completed 2007-2008 bowl season. I also consider applications of the predictions in the development of ratings for college football teams, based on a round-robin playoff scenario. Comments and feedback are more than welcome!

Check out my music page!

Community Service!
The University of Michigan Circle K
The Detroit Project
K-Grams =)

The Presbyterian Church
I'm a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor, where I'm involved with the Worship and Mission Committees. I will be a deacon starting in 2008. Click here to find out more about the Presbyterian Church of the USA.

More stuff...
Click here to see a picture of me and my wife Laura! =)
billiards.com
U of M Billiards
Bananas: IM Campus Champs!
Click here if you're a Monday Moron.
A link to this page when it was a Birthday Present from my friends James DeVaney and Matt Comstock.
Goin' To Work!
Good drops.

This page is constantly under construction, so visit again soon!

Last modified 6/30/08 by Brady T. West