Mathematics Commons^™

An Introduction To Calling Bullshit: Learning To Think Outside The Black Box, Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

Numeracy

Bergstrom, Carl T. and Jevin D. West. 2020. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. (New York: Random House) 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509202.

While statistical methods receive greater attention, the art of critically evaluating information in everyday life more commonly depends on thinking outside the black box of the algorithm. In this piece we introduce readers to our book and associated online teaching materials—for readers who want to more capably call “bullshit” or to teach their students to do the same.

Multiple Baseline Interrupted Time Series: Describing Changes In New Mexico Medicaid Behavioral Health Home Patients’ Care, Jessica Reno

Mathematics & Statistics ETDs

In 2016, the CareLink New Mexico behavioral health homes program began enrolling Medicaid recipients with the goal of increasing care coordination, improving access to services, and decreasing long-term costs of care for adults with serious mental illness (SMI) and children with severe emotional disturbance (SED). To evaluate these aims, a retrospective interrupted time series study using Medicaid claims data was designed. First, a comparable subset of non-enrolled individuals was selected from the pool of Medicaid recipients with SMI or SED using propensity score matching. Then, segmented regression was applied to three outcomes: total Medicaid charges, number of outpatient behavioral health …

Application Of Randomness In Finance, Jose Sanchez, Daanial Ahmad, Satyanand Singh

Publications and Research

Brownian Motion which is also considered to be a Wiener process and can be thought of as a random walk. In our project we had briefly discussed the fluctuations of financial indices and related it to Brownian Motion and the modeling of Stock prices.

Applying Emotional Analysis For Automated Content Moderation, John Shelnutt

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this project is to explore the effectiveness of emotional analysis as a means to automatically moderate content or flag content for manual moderation in order to reduce the workload of human moderators in moderating toxic content online. In this context, toxic content is defined as content that features excessive negativity, rudeness, or malice. This often features offensive language or slurs. The work involved in this project included creating a simple website that imitates a social media or forum with a feed of user submitted text posts, implementing an emotional analysis algorithm from a word emotions dataset, designing …

How Risk-Related Statistics, As Reported In News And Social Media, Are Linked To The Use Of The Public Transit System, Prashiddhi Pokhrel

Thinking Matters Symposium

Due to the pandemic, people have started relying more on televisions, news, social media, and other news outlets for guidance. Moreover, with the increasing amount of news, data, and information there is also an increase in the amount of misleading statistics. People’s opinions and decisions significantly depend on the data, statistics, and information that they are exposed to, as well as their sources. For this project, we want to look at how information and its sources are affecting the decision made by the general public for the usage of the Portland Transit System. It is very important to know why …

Lecture 04: Spatial Statistics Applications Of Hrl, Trl, And Mixed Precision, David Keyes

Mathematical Sciences Spring Lecture Series

As simulation and analytics enter the exascale era, numerical algorithms, particularly implicit solvers that couple vast numbers of degrees of freedom, must span a widening gap between ambitious applications and austere architectures to support them. We present fifteen universals for researchers in scalable solvers: imperatives from computer architecture that scalable solvers must respect, strategies towards achieving them that are currently well established, and additional strategies currently being developed for an effective and efficient exascale software ecosystem. We consider recent generalizations of what it means to “solve” a computational problem, which suggest that we have often been “oversolving” them at the …

Introduction To Statistics In The Psychological Sciences, Linda R. Cote, Rupa Gordon, Chrislyn E. Randell, Judy Schmitt, Helena Marvin

Open Educational Resources Collection

Introduction to Statistics in the Psychological Sciences provides an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of statistics, and hypothesis testing as need for psychology students. The textbook introduces the fundamentals of statistics, an introduction to hypothesis testing, and t Tests. Related samples, independent samples, analysis of variance, correlations, linear regressions and chi-squares are all covered along with expanded appendices with z, t, F correlation, and a Chi-Square table. The text includes key terms and exercises with answers to odd-numbered exercises.

Psychology students often find statistics courses to be different from their other psychology classes. There are some distinct differences, especially involving …

A Unified Approach For Constructing Confidence Intervals And Hypothesis Tests Using H-Function, Weizhen Wang

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

We introduce a general method, named the h-function method, to unify the con- structions of level- exact test and 1− exact confidence interval. Using this method, any confidence interval is improved as follows: i) an approximate interval, including a point estimator, is modified to an exact interval; ii) an exact interval is refined to be an interval that is a subset of the previous one. Two real datasets are used to illustrate the method.

Coloring Permutation-Gain Graphs, Daniel Slilaty

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

Correspondence colorings of graphs were introduced in 2018by Dvoˇr ́ak and Postle as a generalization of list colorings of graphswhich generalizes ordinary graph coloring. Kim and Ozeki observed thatcorrespondence colorings generalize various notions of signed-graph col-orings which again generalizes ordinary graph colorings. In this notewe state how correspondence colorings generalize Zaslavsky’s notionof gain-graph colorings and then formulate a new coloring theory ofpermutation-gain graphs that sits between gain-graph coloring and cor-respondence colorings. Like Zaslavsky’s gain-graph coloring, our newnotion of coloring permutation-gain graphs has well defined chromaticpolynomials and lifts to colorings of the regular covering graph of apermutation-gain graph

On The Evolution Equation For Modelling The Covid-19 Pandemic, Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

The paper introduces and discusses the evolution equation, and, based exclusively on this equation, considers random walk models for the time series available on the daily confirmed Covid-19 cases for different countries. It is shown that a conventional random walk model is not consistent with the current global pandemic time series data, which exhibits non-ergodic properties. A self-affine random walk field model is investigated, derived from the evolutionary equation for a specified memory function which provides the non-ergodic fields evident in the available Covid-19 data. This is based on using a spectral scaling relationship of the type 1/ωα where ω …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …