Preface

The computer software package C-SIDE estimates usual intake distributions for nutrients and foods using statistical methodology developed at Iowa State University. The manual that accompa-nies the software, A User's Guide to C-SIDE (Department of Statistics and CARD 1996), explains how to use C-SIDE to obtain estimates of usual intake distributions. This document provides a detailed description of the statistical methodology itself. Several papers describing the theory and application of the methodology have appeared in the statistical literature, including Nusser et al. (1996a) and (1996b), but this document is the ¯rst to fully describe every step of the method, including the derivation of many results mentioned only brie°y in other sources. The notation in this document may di®er slightly from that used in other sources. The algorithms documented in this report are those implemented by C-SIDE Version 1.0. Todd Krueger helped with the documentation of the algorithms in Chapter 5, and Wayne Fuller provided invaluable editing support. Judy Shafer and Sherrie Martinez performed the initial typesetting and formatting