Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Predicting National Basketball Association Success: A Machine Learning Approach, Adarsh Kannan, Brian Kolovich, Brandon Lawrence, Sohail Rafiqi

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a machine learning based approach to projecting the success of National Basketball Association (NBA) draft prospects. With the proliferation of data, analytics have increasingly be- come a critical component in the assessment of professional and collegiate basketball players. We leverage player biometric data, college statistics, draft selection order, and positional breakdown as modelling features in our prediction algorithms. We found that a player's draft pick and their college statistics are the best predictors of their longevity in the National Basketball Association.

Longitudinal Tracking Of Physiological State With Electromyographic Signals., Robert Warren Stallard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electrophysiological measurements have been used in recent history to classify instantaneous physiological configurations, e.g., hand gestures. This work investigates the feasibility of working with changes in physiological configurations over time (i.e., longitudinally) using a variety of algorithms from the machine learning domain. We demonstrate a high degree of classification accuracy for a binary classification problem derived from electromyography measurements before and after a 35-day bedrest. The problem difficulty is increased with a more dynamic experiment testing for changes in astronaut sensorimotor performance by taking electromyography and force plate measurements before, during, and after a jump from a small platform. A …

Cognitive Virtual Admissions Counselor, Kumar Raja Guvindan Raju, Cory Adams, Raghuram Srinivas

SMU Data Science Review

Abstract. In this paper, we present a cognitive virtual admissions counselor for the Master of Science in Data Science program at Southern Methodist University. The virtual admissions counselor is a system capable of providing potential students accurate information at the time that they want to know it. After the evaluation of multiple technologies, Amazon’s LEX was selected to serve as the core technology for the virtual counselor chatbot. Student surveys were leveraged to collect and generate training data to deploy the natural language capability. The cognitive virtual admissions counselor platform is currently capable of providing an end-to-end conversational dialog to …

A Convolutional Neural Network Model For Species Classification Of Camera Trap Images, Annie Casey

Mathematics Undergraduate Theses

The overall purpose of this study was to automate the manual process of tagging species found in camera trap images using machine learning. The basic design of this study was to implement a Convolutional Neural Network model in Python using the Keras and Tensorflow modules that learn to recognize patterns in images in order to classify what species is in a given image and to label it accordingly. Results of the analysis highlight the importance of a large sample size, the degree of accuracy according to various arguments in the model, effectiveness of multiple layers that include Max Pooling, and …

A Comparison Of Machine Learning Techniques For Taxonomic Classification Of Teeth From The Family Bovidae, Gregory J. Matthews, Juliet K. Brophy, Maxwell Luetkemeier, Hongie Gu, George K. Thiruvathukal

Mathematics and Statistics: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This study explores the performance of machine learning algorithms on the classification of fossil teeth in the Family Bovidae. Isolated bovid teeth are typically the most common fossils found in southern Africa and they often constitute the basis for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Taxonomic identification of fossil bovid teeth, however, is often imprecise and subjective. Using modern teeth with known taxons, machine learning algorithms can be trained to classify fossils. Previous work by Brophy et al. [Quantitative morphological analysis of bovid teeth and implications for paleoenvironmental reconstruction of plovers lake, Gauteng Province, South Africa, J. Archaeol. Sci. 41 (2014), pp. …

Estimating The Optimal Cutoff Point For Logistic Regression, Zheng Zhang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Binary classification is one of the main themes of supervised learning. This research is concerned about determining the optimal cutoff point for the continuous-scaled outcomes (e.g., predicted probabilities) resulting from a classifier such as logistic regression. We make note of the fact that the cutoff point obtained from various methods is a statistic, which can be unstable with substantial variation. Nevertheless, due partly to complexity involved in estimating the cutpoint, there has been no formal study on the variance or standard error of the estimated cutoff point.

In this Thesis, a bootstrap aggregation method is put forward to estimate the …

Smart Classifiers And Bayesian Inference For Evaluating River Sensitivity To Natural And Human Disturbances: A Data Science Approach, Kristen Underwood

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Excessive rates of channel adjustment and riverine sediment export represent societal challenges; impacts include: degraded water quality and ecological integrity, erosion hazards to infrastructure, and compromised public safety. The nonlinear nature of sediment erosion and deposition within a watershed and the variable patterns in riverine sediment export over a defined timeframe of interest are governed by many interrelated factors, including geology, climate and hydrology, vegetation, and land use. Human disturbances to the landscape and river networks have further altered these patterns of water and sediment routing.

An enhanced understanding of river sediment sources and dynamics is important for stakeholders, and …

Comparing Various Machine Learning Statistical Methods Using Variable Differentials To Predict College Basketball, Nicholas Bennett

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this Senior Honors Project is to research, study, and demonstrate newfound knowledge of various machine learning statistical techniques that are not covered in the University of Akron’s statistics major curriculum. This report will be an overview of three machine-learning methods that were used to predict NCAA Basketball results, specifically, the March Madness tournament. The variables used for these methods, models, and tests will include numerous variables kept throughout the season for each team, along with a couple variables that are used by the selection committee when tournament teams are being picked. The end goal is to find …

The Impact Of Data Sovereignty On American Indian Self-Determination: A Framework Proof Of Concept Using Data Science, Joseph Carver Robertson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Data Sovereignty Initiative is a collection of ideas that was designed to create SMART solutions for tribal communities. This concept was to develop a horizontal governance framework to create a strategic act of sovereignty using data science. The core concept of this idea was to present data sovereignty as a way for tribal communities to take ownership of data in order to affect policy and strategic decisions that are data driven in nature. The case studies in this manuscript were developed around statistical theories of spatial statistics, exploratory data analysis, and machine learning. And although these case studies are …

Old English Character Recognition Using Neural Networks, Sattajit Sutradhar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Character recognition has been capturing the interest of researchers since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the Optical Character Recognition for printed material is very robust and widespread nowadays, the recognition of handwritten materials lags behind. In our digital era more and more historical, handwritten documents are digitized and made available to the general public. However, these digital copies of handwritten materials lack the automatic content recognition feature of their printed materials counterparts. We are proposing a practical, accurate, and computationally efficient method for Old English character recognition from manuscript images. Our method relies on a modern machine learning …