Penalized Splines For Longitudinal Data With An Application In AIDS Studies

A penalized spline approximation is proposed in considering nonparametric regression for longitudinal data. Standard linear mixed-effects modeling can be applied for the estimation. It is relatively simple, efficiently computed, and robust to the smooth parameters selection, which are often encountered when local polynomial and smoothing spline techniques are used to analyze longitudinal data set. The method is extended to time-varying coefficient mixed-effects models. The proposed methods are applied to data from an AIDS clinical study. Biological interpretations and clinical implications are discussed. Simulation studies are done to illustrate the proposed methods.