Approximate repeated-measures shrinkage

A general method is formalised for the problem of making predictions for a fixed group of individual units, following a sequence of repeated measures on each. A review of some related work is undertaken and, using some of its terminology, the approach might be described as approximate non-parametric empirical Bayes prediction. It is contended that the method may often produce predictions that are, in practice, comparable or not much worse than more sophisticated methods, but sometimes for a smaller computational cost. Two examples are used to demonstrate the approach, exploring the prediction of baseball averages and spatial-temporal rainfall. The method performs favourably in both examples in comparison with James-Stein, empirical Bayes and other predictions; it also provides a relatively simple and computationally feasible way of determining whether it is worth modelling between-individual variability. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.