Life Sciences Commons^™

Bayesian Methods For Graphical Models With Neighborhood Selection., Sagnik Bhadury

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Graphical models determine associations between variables through the notion of conditional independence. Gaussian graphical models are a widely used class of such models, where the relationships are formalized by non-null entries of the precision matrix. However, in high-dimensional cases, covariance estimates are typically unstable. Moreover, it is natural to expect only a few significant associations to be present in many realistic applications. This necessitates the injection of sparsity techniques into the estimation method. Classical frequentist methods, like GLASSO, use penalization techniques for this purpose. Fully Bayesian methods, on the contrary, are slow because they require iteratively sampling over a quadratic …

Modified-Half-Normal Distribution And Different Methods To Estimate Average Treatment Effect., Jingchao Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three projects related to Modified-Half-Normal distribution and causal inference. In my first project, a new distribution called Modified-Half-Normal distribution was introduced. I explored a few of its distributional properties, the procedures for generating random samples based on Bayesian approaches, and the parameter estimation based on the method of moments. The second project deals with the problem of selection bias of average treatment effect (ATE) if we use the observational data. I combined the propensity score based inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) method and the directed acyclic graph (DAG) to solve this problem. The third project …

Habitat Associations And Reproduction Of Fishes On The Northwestern Gulf Of Mexico Shelf Edge, Elizabeth Marie Keller

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Several of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) shelf-edge banks provide critical hard bottom habitat for coral and fish communities, supporting a wide diversity of ecologically and economically important species. These sites may be fish aggregation and spawning sites and provide important habitat for fish growth and reproduction. Already designated as habitat areas of particular concern, many of these banks are also under consideration for inclusion in the expansion of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. This project aimed to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the communities and fish species on shelf-edge banks by way of gonad histology, …

Modelling Bird Migration With Motus Data And Bayesian State-Space Models, Justin Baldwin

Masters Theses

Bird migration is a poorly-known yet important phenomenon, as understanding movement patterns of birds can inform conservation strategies and public health policy for animal-borne diseases. Recent advances in wildlife tracking technology, in particular the Motus system, have allowed researchers to track even small flying birds and insects with radio transmitters that weigh fractions of a gram. This system relies on a community-based distributed sensor network that detects tagged animals as they move through the detection nodes on journeys that range from small local movements to intercontinental migrations. The quantity of data generated by the Motus system is unprecedented, is on …

Germline Mutation Detection In Next Generation Sequencing Data And Tp53 Mutation Carrier Probability Estimation For Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, Gang Peng

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Next generation sequencing technology has been widely used in genomic analysis, but its application has been compromised by the missing true variants, especially when these variants are rare. We proposed a family-based variant calling method, FamSeq, integrating Mendelian transmission information with de novo mutation and sequencing data to improve the variant calling accuracy. We investigated the factors impacting the improvement of family-based variant calling in simulation data and validated it in real sequencing data. In both simulation and real data, FamSeq works better than the single individual based method.

In FamSeq, we implemented four different methods for the Mendelian genetic …