Digital Commons Network^™

High-Dimensional Variable Selection Via Knockoffs Using Gradient Boosting, Amr Essam Mohamed

Dissertations

As data continue to grow rapidly in size and complexity, efficient and effective statistical methods are needed to detect the important variables/features. Variable selection is one of the most crucial problems in statistical applications. This problem arises when one wants to model the relationship between the response and the predictors. The goal is to reduce the number of variables to a minimal set of explanatory variables that are truly associated with the response of interest to improve the model accuracy. Effectively choosing the true influential variables and controlling the False Discovery Rate (FDR) without sacrificing power has been a challenge …

Bivariate Negative Binomial Hurdle With Random Spatial Effects, Robert Mcnutt

Dissertations

Count data with excess zeros widely occur in ecology, epidemiology, marketing, and many other disciplines. Mixture distributions consisting of a point mass at zero and a separate discrete distribution are often employed in regression models to account for excessive zero observations in the data. While Poisson models are very popular for count data, Negative Binomial models provide greater flexibility due to their ability to account for overdispersion.

This research focuses on developing a method for analyzing bivariate count data with excess zeros collected over a lattice. A bivariate Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Hurdle (ZINBH) regression model with spatial random effects is …