Other Statistics and Probability Commons^™

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Role Of Inhibition And Spiking Variability In Ortho- And Retronasal Olfactory Processing, Michelle F. Craft

Theses and Dissertations

Odor perception is the impetus for important animal behaviors, most pertinently for feeding, but also for mating and communication. There are two predominate modes of odor processing: odors pass through the front of nose (ortho) while inhaling and sniffing, or through the rear (retro) during exhalation and while eating and drinking. Despite the importance of olfaction for an animal’s well-being and specifically that ortho and retro naturally occur, it is unknown whether the modality (ortho versus retro) is transmitted to cortical brain regions, which could significantly instruct how odors are processed. Prior imaging studies show different …

Containing Compounding Container Congestion, Curtis Salinger

CMC Senior Theses

The Covid-19 pandemic caused major disruptions throughout the container shipping supply chain. Professor Dongping Song of Liverpool University wrote a paper discussing the logistical vulnerabilities in the supply chain, including the issue of congestion in ports. This paper examines the Port of Los Angeles from 2018-2021 as it relates to Song’s paper to see how its operations were impacted during the Covid-19 timeframe. It is found that labor shortages, chassis shortages, and change in trade behavior each contributed to the congestion. Unfortunately, the implemented policies were insufficient to bolster the port against sustained challenges and congestion continues to worsen.

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.

Analyzing And Creating Playing Card Cryptosystems, Isaac A. Reiter

Honors Student Research

Before computers, military tacticians and government agents had to rely on pencil-and-paper methods to encrypt information. For agents that want to use low-tech options in order to minimize their digital footprint, non-computerized ciphers are an essential component of their toolbox. Still, the presence of computers limits the pool of effective hand ciphers. If a cipher is not unpredictable enough, then a computer will easily be able to break it. There are 52! ≈ 2^225.58 ways to mix a deck of cards. If each deck order is a key, this means that there are 52! ≈ 2^225.58 different ways to encrypt …

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 …

Applying The Data: Predictive Analytics In Sport, Anthony Teeter, Margo Bergman

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

The history of wagering predictions and their impact on wide reaching disciplines such as statistics and economics dates to at least the 1700’s, if not before. Predicting the outcomes of sports is a multibillion-dollar business that capitalizes on these tools but is in constant development with the addition of big data analytics methods. Sportsline.com, a popular website for fantasy sports leagues, provides odds predictions in multiple sports, produces proprietary computer models of both winning and losing teams, and provides specific point estimates. To test likely candidates for inclusion in these prediction algorithms, the authors developed a computer model, and test …

Evaluating An Ordinal Output Using Data Modeling, Algorithmic Modeling, And Numerical Analysis, Martin Keagan Wynne Brown

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Data and algorithmic modeling are two different approaches used in predictive analytics. The models discussed from these two approaches include the proportional odds logit model (POLR), the vector generalized linear model (VGLM), the classification and regression tree model (CART), and the random forests model (RF). Patterns in the data were analyzed using trigonometric polynomial approximations and Fast Fourier Transforms. Predictive modeling is used frequently in statistics and data science to find the relationship between the explanatory (input) variables and a response (output) variable. Both approaches prove advantageous in different cases depending on the data set. In our case, the data …

On The Sparre-Andersen Risk Models, Ruixi Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis develops several strategies for calculating ruin-related quantities for a variety of extended risk models. We focus on the Sparre-Andersen risk model, also known as the renewal risk model. The idea of arbitrary distribution for the waiting time between claim payments arose in the 1950’s from the collective risk theory, and received many extensions and modifications in recent years. Our goal is to tackle model assumptions that are either too relaxed for traditional methods to apply, or so complicated that elaborate algebraic tools are needed to obtain explicit solutions.

In Chapter 2, we consider a Lévy risk process and …

Predicting The Next Us President By Simulating The Electoral College, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

We develop a simulation model for predicting the outcome of the US Presidential election based on simulating the distribution of the Electoral College. The simulation model has two parts: (a) estimating the probabilities for a given candidate to win each state and DC, based on state polls, and (b) estimating the probability that a given candidate will win at least 270 electoral votes, and thus win the White House. All simulations are coded using the high-level, open-source programming language R. One of the goals of this paper is to promote computational thinking in any STEM field by illustrating how probabilistic …

Sequential Probing With A Random Start, Joshua Miller

HMC Senior Theses

Processing user requests quickly requires not only fast servers, but also demands methods to quickly locate idle servers to process those requests. Methods of finding idle servers are analogous to open addressing in hash tables, but with the key difference that servers may return to an idle state after having been busy rather than staying busy. Probing sequences for open addressing are well-studied, but algorithms for locating idle servers are less understood. We investigate sequential probing with a random start as a method for finding idle servers, especially in cases of heavy traffic. We present a procedure for finding the …

Effect Of Neuromodulation Of Short-Term Plasticity On Information Processing In Hippocampal Interneuron Synapses, Elham Bayat Mokhtari

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Neurons convey information about the complex dynamic environment in the form of signals. Computational neuroscience provides a theoretical foundation toward enhancing our understanding of nervous system. The aim of this dissertation is to present techniques to study the brain and how it processes information in particular neurons in hippocampus.

We begin with a brief review of the history of neuroscience and biological background of basic neurons. To appreciate the importance of information theory, familiarity with the information theoretic basics is required, these basics are presented in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, we use information theory to estimate the amount of …

Multiclass Classification Using Support Vector Machines, Duleep Prasanna W. Rathgamage Don

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we discuss different SVM methods for multiclass classification and introduce the Divide and Conquer Support Vector Machine (DCSVM) algorithm which relies on data sparsity in high dimensional space and performs a smart partitioning of the whole training data set into disjoint subsets that are easily separable. A single prediction performed between two partitions eliminates one or more classes in a single partition, leaving only a reduced number of candidate classes for subsequent steps. The algorithm continues recursively, reducing the number of classes at each step until a final binary decision is made between the last two classes …

Making Models With Bayes, Pilar Olid

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Bayesian statistics is an important approach to modern statistical analyses. It allows us to use our prior knowledge of the unknown parameters to construct a model for our data set. The foundation of Bayesian analysis is Bayes' Rule, which in its proportional form indicates that the posterior is proportional to the prior times the likelihood. We will demonstrate how we can apply Bayesian statistical techniques to fit a linear regression model and a hierarchical linear regression model to a data set. We will show how to apply different distributions to Bayesian analyses and how the use of a prior affects …

On The Analysis Of The Sir Epidemic Model For Small Networks: An Application In Hospital Settings, Martin Lopez-Garcia

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

A Traders Guide To The Predictive Universe- A Model For Predicting Oil Price Targets And Trading On Them, Jimmie Harold Lenz

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

At heart every trader loves volatility; this is where return on investment comes from, this is what drives the proverbial “positive alpha.” As a trader, understanding the probabilities related to the volatility of prices is key, however if you could also predict future prices with reliability the world would be your oyster. To this end, I have achieved three goals with this dissertation, to develop a model to predict future short term prices (direction and magnitude), to effectively test this by generating consistent profits utilizing a trading model developed for this purpose, and to write a paper that anyone with …

Firing Rate Dynamics In Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks With Intrinsic And Network Heterogeneity, Cheng Ly

Statistical Sciences and Operations Research Publications

Heterogeneity of neural attributes has recently gained a lot of attention and is increasing recognized as a crucial feature in neural processing. Despite its importance, this physiological feature has traditionally been neglected in theoretical studies of cortical neural networks. Thus, there is still a lot unknown about the consequences of cellular and circuit heterogeneity in spiking neural networks. In particular, combining network or synaptic heterogeneity and intrinsic heterogeneity has yet to be considered systematically despite the fact that both are known to exist and likely have significant roles in neural network dynamics. In a canonical recurrent spiking neural network model, …

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …