Statistics and Probability Commons^™

The Expanded View Of Individualism And Collectivism: One, Two, Or Four Dimensions?, Jennifer L. Priestley, Kamal Fatehi, Gita Taasoobshirazi

Faculty and Research Publications

Recent research to analyze and discuss cultural differences has employed a combination of five major dimensions of individualism–collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, femininity– masculinity (gender role differentiation), and long-term orientation. Among these dimensions, individualism–collectivism has received the most attention. Chronologically, this cultural attribute has been regarded as one, then two, and more recently, four dimensions of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. However, research on this issue has not been conclusive and some have argued against this expansion. The current study attempts to explain and clarify this discussion by using a shortened version of the scale developed by Singelis et …

The Evolution Of Data Science: A New Mode Of Knowledge Production, Jennifer Lewis Priestley, Robert J. Mcgrath

Faculty and Research Publications

Is data science a new field of study or simply an extension or specialization of a discipline that already exists, such as statistics, computer science, or mathematics? This article explores the evolution of data science as a potentially new academic discipline, which has evolved as a function of new problem sets that established disciplines have been ill-prepared to address. The authors find that this newly-evolved discipline can be viewed through the lens of a new mode of knowledge production and is characterized by transdisciplinarity collaboration with the private sector and increased accountability. Lessons from this evolution can inform knowledge production …

The Validity Of Online Patient Ratings Of Physicians, Jennifer L. Priestley, Yiyun Zhou, Robert Mcgrath

Faculty and Research Publications

Background: Information from ratings sites are increasingly informing patient decisions related to health care and the selection of physicians.

Objective: The current study sought to determine the validity of online patient ratings of physicians through comparison with physician peer review.

Methods: We extracted 223,715 reviews of 41,104 physicians from 10 of the largest cities in the United States, including 1142 physicians listed as “America’s Top Doctors” through physician peer review. Differences in mean online patient ratings were tested for physicians who were listed and those who were not.

Results: Overall, no differences were found between the online patient ratings based …

Analysis Of Praxis Physics Subject Assessment Examinees And Performance: Who Are Our Prospective Physics Teachers?, Herman Ray

Faculty and Research Publications

A generally agreed upon tenant of the physics teaching community is the centrality of subject-specific expertise in effective teaching. However, studies which assess the content knowledge of incoming K–12 physics teachers in the U.S. have not yet been reported. Similarly lacking are studies on if or how the demographic makeup of aspiring physics educators is different from previously reported analyses of the actual high school physics teaching workforce. Here we present findings about the demographics and subject knowledge of prospective high school physics teachers using data from Praxis physics subject assessments administered between 2006 and 2016. Our analysis reveals significant …

A Data Generating Review That Bops, Twists And Pulls At Misconceptions, Kimberly Gardner

Faculty and Research Publications

Statistics is an integral part of the K-12 mathematics curriculum (age 5-18). Naturally, students construct misconceptions of what they learn. This article discusses The Bop It^© Challenge, a review activity assesses student understanding and reveals their misundertandings of statistical concepts.

A Modular Mind? A Test Using Individual Data From Seven Primate Species, Federica Amici, Bradley Barney, Valen E. Johnson, Josep Call, Filippo Aureli

Faculty and Research Publications

It has long been debated whether the mind consists of specialized and independently evolving modules, or whether and to what extent a general factor accounts for the variance in performance across different cognitive domains. In this study, we used a hierarchical Bayesian model to re-analyse individual level data collected on seven primate species (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, spider monkeys, brown capuchin monkeys and long-tailed macaques) across 17 tasks within four domains (inhibition, memory, transposition and support). Our modelling approach evidenced the existence of both a domain-specific factor and a species factor, each accounting for the same amount (17%) of the …

Counting The Impossible: Sampling And Modeling To Achieve A Large State Homeless Count, Jennifer L. Priestley, Jane Massey

Faculty and Research Publications

Objective: Using inferential statistics, we develop estimates of the homeless population of a geographically large and economically diverse state -- Georgia.

Methods: Multiple independent data sources (2000 U.S. Census, the 2006 Georgia County Guide, Georgia Chamber of Commerce) were used to develop Clusters of the 150 Georgia Counties. These clusters were used as "strata" to then execute traified sampling. Homeless counts were conducted within the sample counties, allowing for multiple regression models to be developed to generate predictions of homeless persons by county.

Results: In response to a mandate from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the State …

An Approach To Nearest Neighboring Search For Multi-Dimensional Data, Yong Shi, Li Zhang, Lei Zhu

Faculty and Research Publications

Finding nearest neighbors in large multi-dimensional data has always been one of the research interests in data mining field. In this paper, we present our continuous research on similarity search problems. Previously we have worked on exploring the meaning of K nearest neighbors from a new perspective in PanKNN [20]. It redefines the distances between data points and a given query point Q, efficiently and effectively selecting data points which are closest to Q. It can be applied in various data mining fields. A large amount of real data sets have irrelevant or obstacle information which greatly affects the effectiveness …

Drift And The Risk-Free Rate, Anda Gadidov, M. C. Spruill

Faculty and Research Publications

It is proven, under a set of assumptions differing from the usual ones in the unboundedness of the time interval, that, in an economy in equilibrium consisting of a risk-free cash account and an equity whose price process is a geometric Brownian motion on [0,∞), the drift rate must be close to the risk-free rate; if the drift rate μ and the risk-free rate r are constants, then r = μ and the price process is the same under both empirical and risk neutral measures. Contributing in some degree perhaps to interest in this mathematical curiosity is the fact, based …

Culturally-Adapted And Audio-Technology Assisted Hiv/Aids Awareness And Education Program In Rural Nigeria: A Cohort Study, Ighovwerha Ofotokun, Jose Nilo G. Binongo, Eli S. Rosenberg, Michael Kane, Rick Ifland, Jeffrey L. Lennox, Kirk A. Easley

Faculty and Research Publications

Background: HIV-awareness programs tailored toward the needs of rural communities are needed. We sought to quantify change in HIV knowledge in three rural Nigerian villages following an integrated culturally adapted and technology assisted educational intervention.

Methods: A prospective 14-week cohort study was designed to compare short-term changes in HIV knowledge between seminar-based education program and a novel program, which capitalized on the rural culture of small-group oral learning and was delivered by portable digital-audio technology.

Results: Participants were mostly Moslem (99%), male (53.5%), with no formal education (55%). Baseline HIV knowledge was low (< 80% correct answers for 9 of the 10 questions). Knowledge gain was higher (p < 0.0001 for 8 of 10 questions) in the integrated culturally adapted and technology-facilitated (n = 511) compared with the seminar-based (n = 474) program.

Conclusions: Baseline HIV-awareness was low. Culturally …

The Location Decisions Of Foreign Investors In China: Untangling The Effect Of Wages Using A Control Function Approach, Xuepeng Liu, Mary E. Lovely, Jan Ondrich

Faculty and Research Publications

There is almost no support for the proposition that capital is attracted to low wages from firm-level studies. We examine the location choices of 2,884 firms investing in China between 1993 and 1996 to offer two main contributions. First, we find that the location of labor-intensive activities is highly elastic to provincial wage differences. Generally, investors' wage sensitivity declines as the skill intensity of the industry increases. Second, we find that unobserved location-specific attributes exert a downward bias on estimated wage sensitivity. Using a control function approach, we estimate a downward bias of 50% to 90% in wage coefficients estimated …

Detectability Of Convex-Shaped Objects In Digital Images, Its Fundamental Limit And Multiscale Analysis, Xiaoming Huo, Xuelei (Sherry) Ni

Faculty and Research Publications

Given a convex-shape inhomogeneous region embedded in a noisy image, we consider the conditions under which such an embedded region is detectable. The existence of low order-of-complexity detection algorithms is also studied. The main results are (1) an analytical threshold (of a statistic) that specifies what is detectable, and (2) the existence of a multiscale detection algorithm whose order of complexity is roughly the optimal O(n(2) log(2) (n)).

Our analysis has two main components. We first show that in a discrete image, the number of convex sets increases faster than any finite degree polynomial of the image size n. Hence …

On The Estimation Of Averages Over Infinite Intervals With An Application To Average Persistence In Population Models, Sean F. Ellermeyer

Faculty and Research Publications

We establish a general result for estimating the upper average of a continuous and bounded function over an infinite interval. As an application, we show that a previously studied model of microbial growth in a chemostat with time–varying nutrient input admits solutions (populations) that exhibit weak persistence but not weak average persistence.

Using Paired Comparison Matrices To Estimate Parameters Of The Partial Credit Rasch Measurement Model For Rater-Mediated Assessments, Mary Garner, George Engelhard Jr.

Faculty and Research Publications

The purpose of this paper is to describe a technique for estimating the parameters of a Rasch model that accommodates ordered categories and rater severity. The technique builds on the conditional pairwise algorithm described by Choppin (1968, 1985) and represents an extension of a conditional algorithm described by Garner and Engelhard (2000, 2002) in which parameters appear as the eigenvector of a matrix derived from paired comparisons. The algorithm is used successfully to recover parameters from a simulated data set. No one has previously described such an extension of the pairwise algorithm to a Rasch model that includes both ordered …

Sectorial Convergence Of U-Statistics, Anna Gadidov

Faculty and Research Publications

In this note we show that almost sure convergence to zero of symmetrized U-statistics indexed by a linear sector in ℤ^d₊ is equivalent to convergence along the diagonal of ℤ^d₊, as it is considered in Latała and Zinn [Ann. Probab. 28 (2000) 1908–1924]. Comparisons with similar results for sums of multi-indexed i.i.d. random variables are also made.

The Morphology Of Steve, Eugenie C. Scott, Nicholas J. Matzke, Glenn Branch, Steven Mccullagh

Faculty and Research Publications

This report is part of Project Steve. Project Steve is, among other things, the first scientific analysis of the sex, geographic location, and body size of scientists named Steve. We performed this research for the best of all reasons: we discovered that we had lots of data. No scientist can resist the opportunity to analyze data, regardless of where that data came from or why it was gathered.

The Efficiency Of The College Football Betting Market For Southeastern Conference Teams, Ravija Badarinathi, Ladd Kochman

Faculty and Research Publications

To illustrate economic testing and at the same time to conduct an inquiry into the efficiency of the college football betting market, an analysis applies all the betting rules reported by Stark (1992) to the 10 teams comprising the Southeastern Conference before the recent addition of the universities of Arkansas and South Carolina. The combination of 10 teams and 7 conditions produces a total of 70 betting strategies. Since each rule to bet for a team is shadowed by the alternative of betting against that team, the actual number of rules tested is 140. Among those 140 rules, only 7 …

Municipal Capital Maintenance And Fiscal Distress, Mary K. Bumgarner, Jorge Martinez-Vazques, David L. Sjoquist

Faculty and Research Publications

This paper formalizes and empirically tests the hypothesis that the deficient maintenance of public infrastructure is caused by fiscal distress. We utilize a production-decision framework in which public officials combine maintenance and new capital to produce a desired level of capital services. The behavior implied in the fiscal distress hypothesis is treated as perverse deviations from the optimal production path. The empirical findings from cross-sectional expenditures data give support to the fiscal distress hypothesis.

Linear And Nonlinear Appraisal Models, Billie Ann Brotman

Faculty and Research Publications

In this article, the author uses nonlinear models to forecast the value of four important housing characteristics. The article explains, for example, that each additional bedroom does not add a set incremental dollar figure to the value of a house. The results suggest that nonlinear models predict housing values better than linear ones.