Business Commons^™

Factors That Affect The Rate Of Preterm Birth: An Examination Of The Inter-Related Impacts Of Social Determinants, Behavior And Physical Health Status, Krystal Michelle Hunter

Dissertations

The work seeks to examine the factors that have significant relationships to the rate of preterm birth (PTB) along with its cost to society.

There are four papers within this work. This purpose of the first paper is to measure the impact that healthy behaviors have on the rate of PTB when modeled with other factors like household demographics, community deprivation, chronic disease and mental health. This work finds that positive health behaviors has a negative relationship with PTB. The interaction between body mass index (BMI) and social class and its relationship to PTB is examined in the second paper. …

Statistics-Based Anomaly Detection And Correction Method For Amazon Customer Reviews, Ishani Chatterjee

Dissertations

People nowadays use the Internet to project their assessments, impressions, ideas, and observations about various subjects or products on numerous social networking sites. These sites serve as a great source of gathering information for data analytics, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, etc. The most critical challenge is interpreting this data and capturing the sentiment behind these expressions. Sentiment analysis is analyzing, processing, concluding, and inferencing subjective texts with the views. Companies use sentiment analysis to understand public opinions, perform market research, analyze brand reputation, recognize customer experiences, and study social media influence. According to the different needs for aspect granularity, …

Exploring, Understanding, Then Designing: Twitter Users’ Sharing Behavior For Minor Safety Incidents, Mashael Yousef Almoqbel

Dissertations

Social media has become an integral part of human lives. Social media users resort to these platforms for various reasons. Users of these platforms spend a lot of time creating, reading, and sharing content, therefore, providing a wealth of available information for everyone to use. The research community has taken advantage of this and produced many publications that allow us to better understand human behavior. An important subject that is sometimes discussed and shared on social media is public safety. In the past, Twitter users have used the platform to share incidents, share information about incidents, victims and perpetrators, and …

Multi-Stage Stochastic Optimization And Reinforcement Learning For Forestry Epidemic And Covid-19 Control Planning, Sabah Bushaj

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing new modeling and solution approaches based on multi-stage stochastic programming and reinforcement learning for tackling biological invasions in forests and human populations. Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) is the nemesis of ash trees. This research introduces a multi-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming model to assist forest agencies in managing emerald ash borer insects throughout the U.S. and maximize the public benets of preserving healthy ash trees. This work is then extended to present the first risk-averse multi-stage stochastic mixed-integer program in the invasive species management literature to account for extreme events. Significant computational achievements are obtained using …

Participatory Learning: Measuring Learning And Educational Technology Acceptance, Erick Sanchez Suasnabar

Dissertations

Participatory Learning (PL) integrates several learning approaches, engaging students throughout the entire assignment process for both online and face-to-face courses. Beyond simply providing a solution, students also craft a problem (problem-based learning), grade each other (peer assessment and feedback), evaluate themselves (self-assessment), and can view others’ work (learning by example). This dissertation research explores the resulting learning effects. Contributions to both educational and Information Systems research include extending an early PL model and experiments that applied the PL approach to examinations, by validating and testing new constructs based on user activity and critical thinking. In addition, the study explores a …

Essays On Health Care Quality: Timeliness, Equity, And Efficiency, Abubakar-Sadiq Bouda Abdulai

Dissertations

According to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) (formerly called the Institute of Medicine), a quality health care system embodies six attributes: timeliness, equity, safety, efficiency, effectiveness, and patient-centeredness. Timeliness is to avoid unnecessary delays in care delivery for patients and caregivers; equity is to ensure that the quality of care that patients receive does not vary based on their personal characteristics; safety is to ensure that the care that is intended to help patients does not harm them; efficiency is to avoid waste and optimize resource allocation to improve care delivery; effective care is one that relies on sound …

Reserve Price Optimization In Display Advertising, Achir Kalra

Dissertations

Display advertising is the main type of online advertising, and it comes in the form of banner ads and rich media on publishers' websites. Publishers sell ad impressions, where an impression is one display of an ad in a web page. A common way to sell ad impressions is through real-time bidding (RTB). In 2019, advertisers in the United States spent nearly 60 billion U.S. dollars on programmatic digital display advertising. By 2022, expenditures are expected to increase to nearly 95 billion U.S. dollars. In general, the remaining impressions are sold directly by the publishers. The only way for publishers …

Constructive Solution Methodologies To The Capacitated Newsvendor Problem And Surrogate Extension, Pinyuan Shan

Dissertations

The newsvendor problem is a single-period stochastic model used to determine the order quantity of perishable product that maximizes/minimizes the profit/cost of the vendor under uncertain demand. The goal is to fmd an initial order quantity that can offset the impact of backlog or shortage caused by mismatch between the procurement amount and uncertain demand. If there are multiple products and substitution between them is feasible, overstocking and understocking can be further reduced and hence, the vendor's overall profit is improved compared to the standard problem. When there are one or more resource constraints, such as budget, volume or weight, …