Multivariate Analysis Commons^™

Assessing The Social And Ecological Factors That Influence Childhood Overweight And Obesity, Katie Callahan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States. Currently more than 1 in 3 children aged 2-19 are overweight or obese. This is of major concern because childhood overweight and obesity leads to chronic conditions such as type II diabetes and tracks into adulthood, where more severe adverse health outcomes arise. In this study I used the premise of the social ecological model (SEM) to analyze the common levels that a child is exposed to daily; the intrapersonal level, the interpersonal level, the school level, and the community level to better …

The Structure Of Child And Adolescent Aggression: Confirmatory Factor Analysis Of A Brief Peer Conflict Scale, Justin Russell

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The importance of simultaneous consideration of forms and functions in youth measures of aggressive behavior is well established. Competing models have presented these highly interrelated constructs as either independent (e.g., reactive or overt) or paired factors (e.g., reactive and overt). The current study examines these models in the context of assessing the viability of a new self-report measure, the Peer Conflict Scale – 20 Item Version. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on PCS 20 responses from 1,048 school-age youth living in the Gulf Coast region. Both models significantly improved upon one or two-factor alternatives, and demonstrated partial invariance across gender …

Impacts Of Climate Change On The Evolution Of The Electrical Grid, Melissa Ree Allen

Doctoral Dissertations

Maintaining interdependent infrastructures exposed to a changing climate requires understanding 1) the local impact on power assets; 2) how the infrastructure will evolve as the demand for infrastructure changes location and volume and; 3) what vulnerabilities are introduced by these changing infrastructure topologies. This dissertation attempts to develop a methodology that will a) downscale the climate direct effect on the infrastructure; b) allow population to redistribute in response to increasing extreme events that will increase under climate impacts; and c) project new distributions of electricity demand in the mid-21^st century.

The research was structured in three parts. The first …

Dynamic Bayesian Approaches To The Statistical Calibration Problem, Derick Lorenzo Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

The problem of statistical calibration of a measuring instrument can be framed both in a statistical context as well as in an engineering context. In the first, the problem is dealt with by distinguishing between the "classical" approach and the "inverse" regression approach. Both of these models are static models and are used to estimate "exact" measurements from measurements that are affected by error. In the engineering context, the variables of interest are considered to be taken at the time at which you observe the measurement. The Bayesian time series analysis method of Dynamic Linear Models (DLM) can be used …

Methods For Integrative Analysis Of Genomic Data, Paul Manser

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the development of new genomic technologies has allowed for the investigation of many regulatory epigenetic marks besides expression levels, on a genome-wide scale. As the price for these technologies continues to decrease, study sizes will not only increase, but several different assays are beginning to be used for the same samples. It is therefore desirable to develop statistical methods to integrate multiple data types that can handle the increased computational burden of incorporating large data sets. Furthermore, it is important to develop sound quality control and normalization methods as technical errors can compound when integrating multiple genomic …

Normal Mixture And Contaminated Model With Nuisance Parameter And Applications, Qian Fan

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

This paper intend to find the proper hypothesis and test statistic for testing existence of bilaterally contamination when there exists nuisance parameter. The test statistic is based on method of moments estimators. Union-Intersection test is used for testing if the distribution of population can be implemented by a bilaterally contaminated normal model with unknown variance. This paper also developed a hierarchical normal mixture model (HNM) and applied it to birth weight data. EM algorithm is employed for parameter estimation and a singular Bayesian information criterion (sBIC) is applied to choose the number components. We also proposed a singular flexible information …