A seminar has been delivered by Dr. Tamika Royal-Thomas, Senior Lecturer, Department of  Mathematics, UWI Mona Campus on 11-10-2019 at Mathematics Lecture Theatre 3 (M3). In this regard please find the details as below.
 
Title: The Application of Longitudinal Processes in Predicting Cardiovascular Health
Abstract: In this study, a unique longitudinal dataset that consists of three longitudinal processes is examined. A comprehensive analysis of the interrelationship of these three longitudinal processes is presented using joint modelling of multivariate longitudinal profiles. This study is an extension to the Barker hypothesis which states that maternal and in utero attributes during pregnancy affects a child's cardiovascular health throughout life.  A new methodology is utilized which examines the child’s cardiovascular risk by extending a current view of likelihood estimation. Joint modelling of multivariate longitudinal profiles is done and the extension of the traditional likelihood method is utilized in this work and compared to the maximum likelihood estimates. The main goal of this work is to examine whether the longitudinal attributes in mothers predicts fetal development, which in turn predicts the future cardiovascular health of the children. One of the difficulties with in utero and early childhood data is that certain variables are highly correlated, and so using dimension reduction techniques are quite applicable in this scenario. Principal component analysis (PCA) is utilized in creating a smaller dimension of uncorrelated data, which is then utilized in a longitudinal analysis setting. These principal components are then utilized in a linear mixed model for longitudinal data, which indicates that in utero and early childhood attributes predict the future cardiovascular health of the children.
 
Keywords:  The Barker hypothesis, future cardiovascular health of children, fetal development, linear mixed model, longitudinal analysis.