Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2010/iii/paper-36/4/h/solution

Let denote the child's latent true baseline titre. With the constrained slopes, the conditional mean of log follow-up titre is
Exponentiating this log-scale center gives
Thus the conditional median, or geometric-mean titre, expressed as a fraction of true baseline titre, decays inversely with elapsed time; the child-specific intercept supplies the proportionality constant. It is not an exponential decay in time, and the formula is a follow-up model for , not an extrapolation to the immunisation instant .
For the arithmetic conditional mean, the lognormal distribution correction gives
The correction changes the constant but not the inverse-time dependence when the residual variance is constant. Averaging over random intercepts similarly preserves the time factor whenever the required expectation is finite.

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