Applied Statistics Commons^™

Data Quality Checks: Implementation With Popular Data Collection Crowdsourcing Platforms, James Down, Gregory Balkcom, Kristine Duncan, Ngan (An) Truong, Andrew Lewis

Symposium of Student Scholars

The utilization of online crowdsourcing platforms for data collection has increased over the past two decades in the field of public health due to the ease of use, the cost-saving benefits, the speed of the data collection process, and the accessibility of a potentially true representative population. Although these platforms offer many advantages to researchers, significant drawbacks exist, such as poor data quality, that threaten the reliability and validity of the study. Previous studies have examined data quality concerns, but differences in results arise due to variations in study designs, disciplinary contexts, and the platforms being investigated. Therefore, this study …

Employee Attrition: Analyzing Factors Influencing Job Satisfaction Of Ibm Data Scientists, Graham Nash

Symposium of Student Scholars

Employee attrition is a relevant issue that every business employer must consider when gauging the effectiveness of their employees. Whether or not an employee chooses to leave their job can come from a multitude of factors. As a result, employers need to develop methods in which they can measure attrition by calculating the several qualities of their employees. Factors like their age, years with the company, which department they work in, their level of education, their job role, and even their marital status are all considered by employers to assist in predicting employee attrition. This project will be analyzing a …

Reducing Restaurant Inventory Costs Through Sales Forecasting, Tyler Mason, Chris Schoen, Trevor Gilbert, Jonathan Enriquez

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Family Restaurant is a local restaurant in the greater Atlanta area that serves a variety of dishes that include an assortment of 19 different proteins. Currently, Family Restaurant places protein orders based on business intuition, and tends to over-stock and sometimes under-stock. To minimize inventory costs by reducing over-stocking and preventing under-stocking of proteins, we applied Facebook Prophet (FB Prophet), ARIMA, and XG Boost machine learning models to predict protein demand and then fed these results into a Fixed Time Period inventory model to make an overall order suggestion based on the specified time period. We trained our models on …

Learning From Public Spaces In Historic Cities, Cody Josh Kucharski

Symposium of Student Scholars

Successful public spaces in cities are key for enhancing social cohesion and improving health and safety. Learning from historic cities involves the development of representational and analytical tools aimed at capturing their essence as places of human interaction. The research reports findings of the spatial analysis of twenty Adriatic and Ionian coastal cities, which addresses the question of how the network of public spaces calibrates different degrees of spatial enclosure necessary for creating successful social interactions. Cities in the littoral region include well-preserved historic centers that are renowned for the successful integration of urban squares into the urban fabric. For …

Concerns With Taking The Covid-19 Vaccine, Kaela Bellamy, Robert S. Keyser

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

This IRB-approved descriptive study provides an overview of the concerns associated with receiving a COVID-19 vaccination within the Kennesaw State University community, an R2 university with over 41,000 students, and uses a survey to provide insight into how students, faculty, staff, and administrators are responding to the vaccinations for COVID-19, both available and unavailable, and their preferences. Our research findings indicate that: 1) Most of the population at Kennesaw State University intends to receive the vaccine, regardless of their concerns; 2) The majority of the participants who are either employed or provided an education by Kennesaw State University plan to …

Anti-Vaxxers: Parents Fighting Science, Katie West

Symposium of Student Scholars

Immunizing children helps protect the health of our community, especially those people who cannot be immunized. Yet, since 1996 after a study was released that linked autism to vaccinations, there has been a trend of parents refusing to vaccinate their children. What are the demographics of the parents who believe their children are better off without vaccines? By knowing where these parents live and what decisions they make for their children’s education, counties and medical professionals can provide education and address their concerns.

My research involves data on 116,141 kindergarten classes from 2000-2015 in California. The two vaccine exemption options …

Why Does An Ex-Offender Reoffend?, Jacob Rybak

Symposium of Student Scholars

What leads to an offender to go back to prison? Iowa has collected data tracking recidivism to evaluate the effectiveness of its programs for released offenders. This data set includes the following for all of the offenders: age groups, type of release (parole vs being discharged at the end of their sentence), race, sex, year of release, supervising district, original offense, and whether they recidivated. For the offenders who return to prison, the data set includes measures on days to return, type of recidivism (technicality or new crime), and what the specific offense was that caused their return.

In the …

Opioid Abuse: Are Doctors Creating The Problem?, Nguyen Tran

Symposium of Student Scholars

Opioid abuse and overdose are serious health problems in the United States. Current research has concentrated on the treatment and prevention of opioid abuse. Using data from the Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System (CURES) for California zip codes, my research focuses on the causes of opioid overdose by considering the relationships between the following variables within each zip code: population size, average number of prescriptions per doctor, percentage of people who receive opioid prescriptions, percentage of people receiving the same prescription drug from 3 or more doctors, average number of opioid pills per prescription and number of people …

Market Research: How To Keep And Gain Customers, Chris Mccall

Symposium of Student Scholars

Customer-centered market research is essential to the creation and management of successful marketing campaigns. A company that understands their customers will be able to provide those customers with products and services that fit their needs better than the competition, and ultimately increase profits. My research focuses on a database containing customer information for a telecommunications company called Telco. Within this research, I will focus on a number of customer attributes including demographics, services provided, payment methods, contract lengths, monthly charges, and tenure with the company. Considering how these attributes relate to one another will give me a better understanding of …

Food Deserts: Hungry For Answers, Lawren Cumberbatch

Symposium of Student Scholars

In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5 million people in the United States live in food deserts. As defined by the USDA, a “food desert” is a neighborhood that lacks healthy food sources. This can be measured by distance to a store, number of stores in an area, individual-level resources such as family income or vehicle availability, and neighborhood-level resources such as availability of public transportation. Past research provides evidence that food deserts are especially likely to occur in communities heavily populated by minorities. As a Black Indian pre-med student aiming to join the world …

Determining Malignancy: Can Mammogram Results Help Predict The Diagnosis Of Breast Tumors?, Taylor Behrens

Symposium of Student Scholars

Even with advancements in treatment and preventative care, breast cancer remains an epidemic claiming more than 40,000 American male and female lives each year. The mammogram dataset that I am analyzing was initially complied in the early 1990s by a team from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Past research diagnoses breast cancer from fine-needle aspirates. My research focuses on predicting whether we can determine breast cancer diagnoses without the use of invasive procedures and, in particular, whether we can predict breast cancer based on mammogram data. Do measures of gray-scale texture, radius, concavity, perimeter, compactness, area, and smoothness of …

Accidental Overdoses: Insights To Aid In Prevention, Annabel Nganga

Symposium of Student Scholars

Having lost a friend six years ago to an accidental cocaine overdose, I am very passionate about spreading awareness of accidental drug overdoses that have affected thousands of families countrywide. According to past research, deaths resulting from opiates specifically have been on the rise, and a significant number of deaths in the United States for those below fifty years are caused by drug overdoses. Data exists indicating which states have more overdoses. The data set I will be using includes variables on race, sex, age, drug with which person overdosed, location of the overdose, ultimate cause of death and year …

Death By Police: When “Protecting And Serving” Goes Wrong, Hesper Mallis

Symposium of Student Scholars

The recent cases of law enforcement using lethal force in the United States have gained massive public attention. My dataset is from the Mapping Police Violence website. The website’s focus was to create a heat map to display where police killings occurred most frequently. The website has a dataset with information on 7,664 deaths of suspects. The variables in the dataset include age, sex and race of the suspect; geographic location; alleged threat level; alleged weapon; cause of death; and criminal charges against the officer. In addition, the variables include whether the individual had a mental illness, was armed or …

Are There Predictors Of A Running Back’S Success?, Joshua Price

Symposium of Student Scholars

People who analyze football have concentrated in the past on a running back’s 40-yard dash, shuffle, broad jump, vertical jump, and bench press measures. My research will test if the following variables can predict a running back’s success in the NFL: height, weight, conference, offensive line ranking for their team, the running back’s total yards for the season, their average yards for each attempt, the number of times the running back has entered the end zone for a touchdown that season, the running back’s time average time behind the line of scrimmage (TLOS), the percentage of times the running back …

Sources And Aftermaths Of Pipeline Related Leaks And Spills, Justin Smith

Symposium of Student Scholars

The escape of oil and other hazardous materials have been shown to pollute and destroy ecosystems. As an aspiring chemist, I am adamant about the secure handling and transportation of oil and other hazardous materials. In the past, researchers have concentrated on oil’s high viscosity. Oil’s high viscosity physically smothers wildlife, affecting their ability to continue critical functions such as respiration, feeding, and thermoregulation. My research focuses on the source of these oil spills, as well as natural gas leaks, for the purpose of risk assessment. In addition, I compare recovery efforts based on the cause of the leak/spill, the …

On The Front Lines Of Fire: How Do We Save Their Lives?, Cathrine Jatta

Symposium of Student Scholars

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports that the United States depends on about 1.1 million firefighters to protect its citizens and property from fire. NIOSH adds that approximately 336,000 are career firefighters; 812,000 are volunteers; and 80 to 100 die in the line of duty each year. NIOSH investigates each fatality individually for the cause and prevention. In contrast, my research will look at a complete dataset of 2005 firefighter fatalities and see if any of the following variables may predict firefighter death: age, cause of death, property type, type of duty (e.g. on-duty, training), and …

Cervical Cancer: Are There Ways To Reduce The Risks?, Madelyn Dorn

Symposium of Student Scholars

History has shown us that when caught early, cervical cancer is curable. Past research has found that the sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), herpes and human papillomavirus (HPV), have been associated with cervical cancer. In contrast, my dataset on 859 women has many more STDs and lifestyle choices compiled on 36 variables. The diagnoses in the dataset are many: cervical condylomatosis, vaginal condylomatosis, vulvo-perineral condylomatosis, syphilis, pelvic inflammatory disease, genital herpes, molluscum contagiosum, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B, HPV, and cervical cancer. In addition to the demographic variable on age, there are many lifestyle choice …

Marijuana Arrests In Toronto Canada: A Look Into The Canadian Criminal Justice System, Steven Tully

Symposium of Student Scholars

Marijuana related drug offenses made up fifty-eight percent of all Controlled Drugs and Substances Act offenses in Canada in 2016. On October 17, 2018, Canada legalized marijuana. As part of the efforts to legalize marijuana, descriptive statistics of single variables, like the age of the arrestees and the number of people arrested per year, were reported by the Toronto Star newspaper. The dataset analyzed in this research predates the legalization of marijuana and was collected from 1997 to 2002 on 5,226 individuals arrested in Toronto, Canada for simple possession of small quantities of marijuana. When an offender was arrested for …

Who Is Next? Evaluating Factors That May Contribute To Heart Failure, Davon Broadwater

Symposium of Student Scholars

Cardiovascular diseases are the number one causes of death globally, and for African Americans those risks are even higher. As an African American university student studying Biology, I am passionate about researching the diseases that affect my race. Current research states that behavioral factors such as obesity, tobacco use, unhealthy diet, and harmful use of alcohol should be avoided. I have chosen to research predictors of what helps patients survive if they already have heart failure. Heart failure develops gradually, where the heart becomes weaker over time and has trouble pumping blood to nourish the cells in the body. Data …

Eradicating Zebra Mussels: What Works?, Elijah Davies

Symposium of Student Scholars

The invasion of U.S lakes and rivers by the invasive species of zebra mussels called Dreissena polymorpha has caused catastrophic harm to the local ecosystem by reproducing and outcompeting native mussel species as well as harm to pipes leading into water sources by binding to surfaces and reproducing to the point that the mussels clog pipes. In addition, recreation areas must be closed due to the sharp shells making areas unusable. In the past, research has focused on individual molluscicides and their eradication of zebra mussels, as well as their effect on native flora and fauna. My research will contrast …

Bias In Police Shootings: Is It Just An Opinion?, Phuong Ho

Symposium of Student Scholars

The claims of racism have drawn public attention toward police brutality and its impact on minorities. Is this just an opinion or is there any statistical evidence? Recent studies from The Atlantic have investigated the average age and ethnicity of victims from police killings in 2015-2016. As an Asian-American, I am motivated to examine the issue of police killings among races and other demographics to find any bias that is present. Using the dataset of 2,204 victims of police killings (2015-2016) collected by The Guardian, I will examine the following variables for bias: age, cause of death, armed/unarmed, race/ethnicity, and …

Do Environmental Toxins Predict Violent Crimes?, Tyler Stahl

Symposium of Student Scholars

Do chemical pollutants that persistent in the environment and bioaccumulate in the body affect human health and behavior? Could these Persistent, Bioaccumulative, and Toxic (PBT) chemicals play a role in the cause of violent crimes due to deterioration of mental and cognitive functions? In the past, Mercury, a PBT chemical, has been shown in salmon to be associated with aggression. Could similar aggression occur in humans exposed to mercury through a toxic spill? Two sources of data are utilized in this analysis. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Annual Toxic Release Inventory publishes data on toxic releases into the environment and …

Why Does An Ex-Offender Reoffend?, Jacob Rybak

Symposium of Student Scholars

What leads an offender to go back to prison? This researcher has lived in the Georgia State prison system for 3.5 years. Using personal insights as well as analytics, this researcher analyzes Iowa state’s six-year data set tracking recidivism of released offenders and recommends changes to the prison system to address the analytical findings.

The Iowa recidivism data set includes the following information for all offenders: age group, type of release (parole vs different discharges), release year, original offense, and whether they recidivated. For the recidivating offenders, the data set includes the days to return to prison, the type of …

Access To Higher Education: Do Schools “Grant” Success?, Nathaniel Jones

Symposium of Student Scholars

University education can lead to upward income mobility for low-income students. Being exposed to other student’s life experiences that are different from their own may highlight activities and actions that they may want to consider aiding their success. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median weekly earnings in 2019 for all workers in the U.S. was $969. Of those, U.S. workers who held bachelor’s degrees earned $1,248. In 2016, the Brookings Institute found that Pell Grant recipients and first-generation student loan borrowers attended universities that had lower graduation rates and higher loan default rates in comparison to …

Reporting Of Eating Disorder Deaths, Katherine Mobley, Amy Hord

Symposium of Student Scholars

Those affected by eating disorders experience disturbances in eating behaviors which are often related to underlying psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (Parekh, 2017, Drieberg et al., 1998 p.53). The duplicitous nature of the disorder makes it difficult to diagnose, and the tole it takes on an individual’s physical health makes its mortality rate the second highest among psychiatric disorders (Guinhut et al., 2021 p.130). Even if the correct education and resources are accessible to certain individuals, negative stigmatization about the disorder can make sufferers unlikely to seek help (Becker et al., 2010). Findings from analysis of …

An Automatic Interaction Detection Hybrid Model For Bankcard Response Classification, Yan Wang, Sherry Ni, Brian Stone

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

Data mining techniques have numerous applications in bankcard response modeling. Logistic regression has been used as the standard modeling tool in the financial industry because of its almost always desirable performance and its interpretability. In this paper, we propose a hybrid bankcard response model, which integrates decision tree-based chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) into logistic regression. In the first stage of the hybrid model, CHAID analysis is used to detect the possible potential variable interactions. Then in the second stage, these potential interactions are served as the additional input variables in logistic regression. The motivation of the proposed hybrid model …

A Two-Stage Hybrid Model By Using Artificial Neural Networks As Feature Construction Algorithms, Yan Wang, Sherry Ni, Brian Stone

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

We propose a two-stage hybrid approach with neural networks as the new feature construction algorithms for bankcard response classifications. The hybrid model uses a very simple neural network structure as the new feature construction tool in the first stage, then the newly created features are used as the additional input variables in logistic regression in the second stage. The model is compared with the traditional one-stage model in credit customer response classification. It is observed that the proposed two-stage model outperforms the one-stage model in terms of accuracy, the area under the ROC curve, and KS statistic. By creating new …

Predicting Class-Imbalanced Business Risk Using Resampling, Regularization, And Model Ensembling Algorithms, Yan Wang, Sherry Ni

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

We aim at developing and improving the imbalanced business risk modeling via jointly using proper evaluation criteria, resampling, cross-validation, classifier regularization, and ensembling techniques. Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC of ROC) is used for model comparison based on 10-fold cross-validation. Two undersampling strategies including random undersampling (RUS) and cluster centroid undersampling (CCUS), as well as two oversampling methods including random oversampling (ROS) and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), are applied. Three highly interpretable classifiers, including logistic regression without regularization (LR), L1-regularized LR (L1LR), and decision tree (DT) are implemented. Two ensembling techniques, including Bagging and Boosting, are …

A Xgboost Risk Model Via Feature Selection And Bayesian Hyper-Parameter Optimization, Yan Wang, Sherry Ni

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

This paper aims to explore models based on the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) approach for business risk classification. Feature selection (FS) algorithms and hyper-parameter optimizations are simultaneously considered during model training. The five most commonly used FS methods including weight by Gini, weight by Chi-square, hierarchical variable clustering, weight by correlation, and weight by information are applied to alleviate the effect of redundant features. Two hyper-parameter optimization approaches, random search (RS) and Bayesian tree-structuredParzen Estimator (TPE), are applied in XGBoost. The effect of different FS and hyper-parameter optimization methods on the model performance are investigated by the Wilcoxon Signed Rank …

Texture-Based Deep Neural Network For Histopathology Cancer Whole Slide Image (Wsi) Classification, Nelson Zange Tsaku

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Automatic histopathological Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis for cancer classification has been highlighted along with the advancements in microscopic imaging techniques. However, manual examination and diagnosis with WSIs is time-consuming and tiresome. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have succeeded in histopathological image analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cancer texture-based deep neural network (CAT-Net) that learns scalable texture features from histopathological WSIs. The innovation of CAT-Net is twofold: (1) capturing invariant spatial patterns by dilated convolutional layers and (2) Reducing model complexity while improving performance. Moreover, CAT-Net can provide discriminative texture patterns formed on cancerous regions of histopathological …