Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Development Of An App For The Kalamazoo Nature Center, Ernest Au

Honors Theses

Kalamazoo Nature Center (KNC), which has been recognized by its peers as one of the top nature centers in the country, is home to over 14 miles of hiking trails winding through woods, wetlands, and prairies. There are numerous places/plots in KNC that have an interesting and impressive history besides being home to a variety of animals and hundreds of wildflowers and other plant life. To improve the visitor’s experience at KNC, we will design a software app via the senior capstone project at the department of Computer Science at WMU. As the first step towards establishing a reference model …

Identifying Key Activity Indicators In Rats' Neuronal Data Using Lasso Regularized Logistic Regression, Avery Woods

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to identify timestamps of rats’ neuronal activity that best determine behavior using a machine learning model. Neuronal data is a complex and high-dimensional dataset, and identifying the most informative features is crucial for understanding the underlying neuronal processes. The Lasso regularization technique is employed to select the most relevant features of the data to the model’s prediction. The results of this study provide insights into the key activity indicators that are associated with specific behaviors or cognitive processes in rats, as well as the effect that stress can have on neuronal activity and behavior. Ultimately, it was …

An Application Of The Pagerank Algorithm To Ncaa Football Team Rankings, Morgan Majors

Honors Theses

We investigate the use of Google’s PageRank algorithm to rank sports teams. The PageRank algorithm is used in web searches to return a list of the websites that are of most interest to the user. The structure of the NCAA FBS football schedule is used to construct a network with a similar structure to the world wide web. Parallels are drawn between pages that are linked in the world wide web with the results of a contest between two sports teams. The teams under consideration here are the members of the 2021 Football Bowl Subdivision. We achieve a total ordering …

The 2015 Ncaa Cost-Of-Attendance Stipend And Its Effects On Institutional Financial Aid Packages, Sara Greene

Honors Theses

In 2015, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) allowed “Cost of Attendance” (COA) stipends to be offered to athletic recruits for Division I schools. These stipends are intended to allow schools to grant aid to student-athletes beyond a full-ride scholarship to cover additional costs imposed on student-athletes. These stipends created an opportunity for the “Autonomy” Power 5 programs to utilize a competitive tactic to try to win over the top recruits. There is evidence that these COA stipends have caused an increase in the estimated cost of attendance reported by the university. This paper examines if the COA stipends have …

From Big Farm To Big Pharma: A Differential Equations Model Of Antibiotic-Resistant Salmonella In Industrial Poultry Populations, Rilyn Mckallip

Honors Theses

Antibiotics are used in poultry production as prophylaxis, curative treatment, and growth promotion. The first use is as prophylaxis, or prevention of common bacterial diseases. The crowded conditions in concentrated animal feeding operations necessitate management of infectious disease to ensure overall animal health and the profitability of such operations. In these farms, between 20,000 and 125,000 birds are raised in shed-like enclosures [3], with an average of less than one square foot of space per chicken [34]. Antibiotics are currently used in chicken farms to manage and prevent common bacterial diseases such as respiratory and digestive tract infections, as well …

Length Bias Estimation Of Small Businesses Lifetime, Simeng Li

Honors Theses

Small businesses, particularly restaurants, play a crucial role in the economy by generating employment opportunities, boosting tourism, and contributing to the local economy. However, accurately estimating their lifetimes can be challenging due to the presence of length bias, which occurs when the likelihood of sampling any particular restaurant's closure is influenced by its duration in operation. To address the issue, this study conducts goodness-of-fit tests on exponential/gamma family distributions and employs the Kaplan-Meier method to more accurately estimate the average lifetime of restaurants in Carytown. By providing insights into the challenges of estimating the lifetimes of small businesses, this study …

Utilizing Markov Chains To Estimate Allele Progression Through Generations, Ronit Gandhi

Honors Theses

All populations display patterns in allele frequencies over time. Some alleles cease to exist, while some grow to become the norm. These frequencies can shift or stay constant based on the conditions the population lives in. If in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the allele frequencies stay constant. Most populations, however, have bias from environmental factors, sexual preferences, other organisms, etc. We propose a stochastic Markov chain model to study allele progression across generations. In such a model, the allele frequencies in the next generation depend only on the frequencies in the current one.

We use this model to track a recessive allele …

Active Vs Passive Investing, Garret Buchheit

Honors Theses

With the increased popularity of passive investing, the long-term investment success of active management is being questioned more frequently. For this reason, this research seeks to find whether actively managed funds produce sufficient returns that cover the fees and management costs associated with them. A comparative analysis was made with 5401 actively managed U.S. mutual funds and several common market indices over three, five, and ten-year time spans ranging from 2012 to 2021. Additionally, an analysis was made comparing active and passive management in the recessionary period of 2007 to 2009. Finally, analysis was conducted on annual holdings turnover rates …

Bootstrapped Fractional Designs Applied To Models With Both Mixture And Process Variables, Laura Vinton

Honors Theses

Mixture variables are unique as the components must sum to 1, causing problems when there is interaction between mixture and process variables. The best model is the fully linearized model, but this can get large quickly. We began by comparing models on multiple data sets. These models include linear and nonlinear models. After seeing that nonlinear models appear to be the best alternatives, we used the systematically selected fractions of each data set in order to obtain an in and out of sample RMSE. This allows us to see if there is evidence of overfitting, how well the model predicts …

Increasing Perceived Realism Of Objects In A Mixed Reality Environment Using 'Diminished Virtual Reality', Logan Scott Parker

Honors Theses

With the recent explosion of popularity of virtual and mixed reality, an important question has arisen: “Is there a way to create a better blend of real and virtual worlds in a mixed reality experience?” This research attempts to determine whether a visual filter can be created and applied to virtual objects to better convince the brain into interpreting a composite of virtual and real views as one seamless view. The method devised in this thesis is being called 'Diminished Virtual Reality'. The results found in this study show that when presented with a scene composed of a combination of …

The Efficacy Of The Covid-19 Vaccine In Mississippi, Ilyse Miriam Levy

Honors Theses

The Efficacy of The COVID-19 Vaccine in Mississippi

(Under the direction of Dr. Xin Dang)

By tracking and analyzing fifty-three weeks of COVID-19 data, this thesis analyzes the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine within the State of Mississippi. Over the course of these fifty-three weeks, I have also been able to calculate the confidence intervals for vaccination efficacy and the risk reduction due to vaccination by using data regarding the correlations between deaths and vaccination status, provided to me by the Mississippi Office of Epidemiology. My analysis demonstrates that the COVID-19 vaccine is effective not only in Mississippi but also …

Split Classification Model For Complex Clustered Data, Katherine Gerot

Honors Theses

Classification in high-dimensional data has generated tremendous interest in a multitude of fields. Data in higher dimensions often tend to reside in non-Euclidean metric space. This prevents Euclidean-based classification methodologies, such as regression, from reliably modeling the data. Many proposed models rely on computationally-complex embedding to convert the data to a more usable format. Others, namely the Support Vector Machine, rely on kernel manipulation to implicitly describe the "feature space" to arrive at a non-linear decision boundary. The proposed methodology in this paper seeks to classify complex data in a relatively computationally-simple and explainable manner.

Hitting It Out Of The Park: How Major League Baseball Changed The Game By Not Changing Anything At All, Kyle Sorgi

Honors Theses

In this paper, I will examine the integration of baseball into American culture and statistics’ involvement in that process. This paper will paint a clear picture of the emergence and acceptance of analytics in baseball through a gradual transformation of the style of play spanning the past few decades in the form of increased strikeouts, homeruns, and extra-base hits. Furthermore, this paper will explore the polarizing implications of analytical baseball on and off the field. One of the main questions that this paper will explore is whether or not MLB can go too far with its statistic-minded initiative (if it …

Developing Prediction Models For Kidney Stone Disease, Joseph Palko

Honors Theses

Kidney stone disease has become more prevalent through the years, leading to high treatment cost and associated health risks. In this study, we explore a large medical database and machine learning methods to extract features and construct models for diagnosing kidney stone disease.

Data of 46,250 patients and 58,976 hospital admissions were extracted and analyzed, including patients’ demographic information, diagnoses, vital signs, and laboratory measurements of the blood and urine. We compared the kidney stone (KDS) patients to patients with abdominal and back pain (ABP), patients diagnosed with nephritis, nephrosis, renal sclerosis, chronic kidney disease, or acute and unspecified renal …

Use Of Linear Discriminant Analysis In Song Classification: Modeling Based On Wilco Albums, Caroline Pollard

Honors Theses

The study of music recommender algorithms is a relatively new area of study. Although these algorithms serve a variety of functions, they primarily help advertise and suggest music to users on music streaming services. This thesis explores the use of linear discriminant analysis in music categorization for the purpose of serving as a cheaper and simpler content-based recommender algorithm. The use of linear discriminant analysis was tested by creating lineardiscriminant functions that classify Wilco’s songs into their respective albums, specifically A.M., Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Sky Blue Sky. 4 sample songs were chosen from each album, and song data was …

Golf: Strategies For Success, Lauren Dunaway

Honors Theses

A study into the win probability of certain strategies in the card game Golf.

Projecting Regions Of North Atlantic Right Whale, Eubalaena Glacialis, Habitat Suitability In The Gulf Of Maine In 2050, Camille Ross

Honors Theses

North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) are endangered. Understanding the role environmental conditions play in habitat suitability is key to determining the regions in need of protection for conservation of the species, particularly as climate change shifts suitable habitat. This thesis uses three species distribution modeling algorithms, together with historical data on whale abundance(1993 to 2009) and environmental covariates to build monthly ensemble models of past E. glacialis habitat suitability in the Gulf of Maine. Then, the models are projected onto the year 2050 for a range of climate scenarios. Specifically, the distribution of the species was modeled …

Biodiversity And Distribution Of Benthic Foraminifera In Harrington Sound, Bermuda: The Effects Of Physical And Geochemical Factors On Dominant Taxa, Nam Le

Honors Theses

Harrington Sound, Bermuda, is a nearly enclosed lagoon acting as a subtropical/tropical, carbonate-rich basin in which carbonate sediments, reef patches, and carbonate-producing organisms accumulate. Here, one of the most important calcareous groups is the Foraminifera. Analyses of common benthic orders, including miliolids (Quinqueloculina and Triloculina spp.) and rotaliids (Homotrema rubrum, Elphidium spp., and Ammonia beccarii), are essential in understanding past and present environmental conditions affecting the island's coastal environment. These taxa have been studied previously; however, factors explaining their individual patterns of abundance in the Sound are not well detailed. The goal of this study is …

Quantitative Appraisal Of Non-Irrigated Cropland In South Dakota, Shelby Riggs

Honors Theses

This appraisal attempts to remove subjectivity from the appraisal process and replace it with quantitative analysis of known data to generate a fair market value of the subject property. Two methods of appraisal were used, the income approach and the comparable sales approach. For the income approach, I used the average cash rent for the region, the current property taxes for the subject property, and a capitalization rate based on Stokes' (2018) capitalization rate formula to arrive at my income-based valuation. For the comparable sales approach, I utilized Stokes' (2018) research in optimization modeling to estimate a market value for …

An Empirical Analysis Of Climatic, Geographic, And Cultural Determinants Of International Tourism, Ethan Straus

Honors Theses

Each year, billions of people visit different countries all around the world. For many of those countries, tourism is their primary industry, leading to millions of jobs and dollars in revenue. It is expected that by 2020 total International Tourism Receipts will reach 2 trillion US dollars annually. Currently, tourism employs an estimated 200 million people around the world. With the continued progression of climate change, the tourism industry is facing a newfound threat. Global temperatures and the seal level are both expected to rise significantly by the end of the century. Additionally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has …

Mechanism Design, Matching Theory And The Stable Roommates Problem, Yashaswi Mohanty

Honors Theses

This thesis consists of two independent albeit related chapters. The first chapter introduces concepts from mechanism design and matching theory, and discusses potential applications of this theory, particularly in relation to dorm allocations in colleges. The second chapter investigates a subset of the dorm allocation problem, namely that of matching roommates. In particular, the paper looks at the probability of solvability of random instances of the stable roommates game under the condition that preferences are not completely random and exogenous but endogenously determined through a dependence on room choice. These probabilities are estimated using Monte-Carlo simulations and then compared with …

The Technological Revolution And Data Science, Leslie Walcott

Honors Theses

What was once only depicted in science fiction is now a reality: computers are taking jobs from humans. As technology improves, automation is transforming the workplace. They say a “fourth industrial revolution” is inevitable within the next ten years. In the industrial revolution, the jobs lost were unskilled laborers, such as coal miners, textiles manufacturers, or cotton workers. There was no argument for whether or not a machine could do the jobs more efficiently--it was fact. The term technological unemployment means the loss of jobs caused by technological change. The headline, “Factory workers replaced by automation,” is not particularly startling …

Computing The (Un)Computable: A Computationally-Augmented Perspective On The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy, Ryan Muther

Honors Theses

Computational methods have been used with increasing frequency in the social sciences and humanities, due to the availability of digital sources and computing power to study everything from changes in the meanings of words in Latin texts to how knowledge was categorized in eighteen century encyclopedias. Recent trends in the fields of digital humanities and computational social science include statistical methods like machine learning, requiring large pre-tagged and annotated sets of documents which in turn necessitates a great deal of prior work to create data to use with such methods. This reliance on large corpora of annotated data limits the …

Presidential Popularity And The Linear Model, April Gosser

Honors Theses

Since the 1970's, much research has been done in an attempt to determine variables that cause decline of the president's popularity. Although there are different studies that give various reasons for the decline of the president's popularity, all agree that there is a trend of decline over the president's term. To represent the decline, James Stimson suggested a parabola model, whereas John Mueller suggested a linear-regression model. This paper attempts to show that a linear-regression model is more effective in explaining decline of the presidents from Truman to Johnson, than from Nixon to Bush. The findings show that a linear …

The Auditor And Statistical Sampling Techniques, Marilyn Metcalf

Honors Theses

"The auditor's overall objective is to determine whether the accounting process is free from material error." To complete his objective, the auditor must thoroughly analyze all aspects of the financial statements used in the accounting process in order to satisfy himself that they fairly represent the results of activity for the period under audit and of the financial position at the end of that period. If the volume of the transactions is great, time and economic factors may keep the auditor from making a 100 percent examination. Since a complete examination cannot be made, the auditor must choose a portion …

The Mean In Statistics, Rex E. Babcock

Honors Theses

When one speaks of how statistics have been utilized in decades past there is much to say. However, it is even more astonishing when one speaks of the utilization of statistics today. The use of statistics is widespread virtually over all of the world today, and is put to use in such fields as surveys, census, psychometrics, and almost every business, vocation, and employment that may come to one's mind. But I wish to confine myself to the mean in statistics; I will even make another boundary on myself by discussing only the arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, and …