Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimization In Non-Parametric Survival Analysis And Climate Change Modeling, Iuliana Teodorescu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many of the open problems of current interest in probability and statistics involve complicated data

sets that do not satisfy the strong assumptions of being independent and identically distributed. Often,

the samples are known only empirically, and making assumptions about underlying parametric

distributions is not warranted by the insufficient information available. Under such circumstances,

the usual Fisher or parametric Bayes approaches cannot be used to model the data or make predictions.

However, this situation is quite often encountered in some of the main challenges facing statistical,

data-driven studies of climate change, clinical studies, or financial markets, to name a few. …