Probability Commons^™

Comparing Various Machine Learning Statistical Methods Using Variable Differentials To Predict College Basketball, Nicholas Bennett

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this Senior Honors Project is to research, study, and demonstrate newfound knowledge of various machine learning statistical techniques that are not covered in the University of Akron’s statistics major curriculum. This report will be an overview of three machine-learning methods that were used to predict NCAA Basketball results, specifically, the March Madness tournament. The variables used for these methods, models, and tests will include numerous variables kept throughout the season for each team, along with a couple variables that are used by the selection committee when tournament teams are being picked. The end goal is to find …

Statistical Analysis Of Momentum In Basketball, Mackenzi Stump

Honors Projects

The “hot hand” in sports has been debated for as long as sports have been around. The debate involves whether streaks and slumps in sports are true phenomena or just simply perceptions in the mind of the human viewer. This statistical analysis of momentum in basketball analyzes the distribution of time between scoring events for the BGSU Women’s Basketball team from 2011-2017. We discuss how the distribution of time between scoring events changes with normal game factors such as location of the game, game outcome, and several other factors. If scoring events during a game were always randomly distributed, or …

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 …

Statistical Modelling, Optimal Strategies And Decisions In Two-Period Economies, Jiang Wu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Motivated by some real problems, our thesis puts forward two general two-period pricing models and explore optimal buying and selling strategies in two states of the two-period decision, when buyer/seller's decisions in the two periods are uncertain: commodity valuations may or may not be independent, may or may not follow the same distribution, be heavily or just lightly influenced by exogenous economic conditions, and so on. For both the example of buying laptops and the example of selling houses, the connections between each example and the two-envelope paradox encourage us to explore optimal strategies based on the works of McDonnell …

Statistical Analysis Of Markovian Queueing Models Of Limit Order Books, Yiyao Luo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the suitability of some Markovian queueing models in being able to effectively describe the dynamical properties of a limit order book more specifically. We review and compare the assumptions proposed by Huang et al.[Quantitative Finance,12,547-557(2012)] and Cont et al.[SIAM Journal for Financial Mathematics,4,1- 25(2013)], and estimate the intensity parameters in both ways, based on real data of a stock on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Trough comparing by cumulative distribution functions of first-passage time to state 0, we will hsow that the estimators of Cont’s model fit our data better and we put …

Inference In Networking Systems With Designed Measurements, Chang Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Networking systems consist of network infrastructures and the end-hosts have been essential in supporting our daily communication, delivering huge amount of content and large number of services, and providing large scale distributed computing. To monitor and optimize the performance of such networking systems, or to provide flexible functionalities for the applications running on top of them, it is important to know the internal metrics of the networking systems such as link loss rates or path delays. The internal metrics are often not directly available due to the scale and complexity of the networking systems. This motivates the techniques of inference …

Quantifying The Effect Of The Shift In Major League Baseball, Christopher John Hawke Jr.

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Baseball is a very strategic and abstract game, but the baseball world is strangely obsessed with statistics. Modern mainstream statisticians often study offensive data, such as batting average or on-base percentage, in order to evaluate player performance. However, this project observes the game from the opposite perspective: the defensive side of the game. In hopes of analyzing the game from a more concrete perspective, countless mathemeticians - most famously, Bill James - have developed numerous statistical models based on real life data of Major League Baseball (MLB) players. Large numbers of metrics go into these models, but what this project …

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 …

Newsvendor Models With Monte Carlo Sampling, Ijeoma W. Ekwegh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Newsvendor Models with Monte Carlo Sampling by Ijeoma Winifred Ekwegh The newsvendor model is used in solving inventory problems in which demand is random. In this thesis, we will focus on a method of using Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the order quantity that will either maximizes revenue or minimizes cost given that demand is uncertain. Given data, the Monte Carlo approach will be used in sampling data over scenarios and also estimating the probability density function. A bootstrapping process yields an empirical distribution for the order quantity that will maximize the expected profit. Finally, this method will be used …

Niche-Based Modeling Of Japanese Stiltgrass (Microstegium Vimineum) Using Presence-Only Information, Nathan Bush

Masters Theses

The Connecticut River watershed is experiencing a rapid invasion of aggressive non-native plant species, which threaten watershed function and structure. Volunteer-based monitoring programs such as the University of Massachusetts’ OutSmart Invasives Species Project, Early Detection Distribution Mapping System (EDDMapS) and the Invasive Plant Atlas of New England (IPANE) have gathered valuable invasive plant data. These programs provide a unique opportunity for researchers to model invasive plant species utilizing citizen-sourced data. This study took advantage of these large data sources to model invasive plant distribution and to determine environmental and biophysical predictors that are most influential in dispersion, and to identify …

Tropical Cyclone Wind Hazard Assessment For Southeast Part Of Coastal Region Of China, Sihan Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tropical cyclone (TC) or typhoon wind hazard and risk are significant for China. The return period value of the maximum typhoon wind speed is used to characterize the typhoon wind hazard and assign wind load in building design code. Since the historical surface observations of typhoon wind speed are often scarce and of short period, the typhoon wind hazard assessment is often carried out using the wind field model and TC track model. For a few major cities in the coastal region of mainland China, simple or approximated wind field models and a circular subregion method (CSM) have been used …

Using Capture-Mark-Recapture Techniques To Estimate Detection Probabilities & Fidelity Of Expression For The Critically Endangered James Spinymussel (Pleurobema Collina)., Alaina C. Esposito

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The critically endangered James Spinymussel (Pleurobema collina) is a species of freshwater mussel endemic to Virginia’s James and Dan River basins. In the last 20 years, P. collina has experienced a substantial decline in numbers and currently occupies approximately 10% of its original habitat; however, little information is known about this species to assist in conservation. A 230-meter reach of transitional habitat in Swift Run was selected for repeat observations to estimate detection probabilities using a Capture-Mark-Recapture framework. In June 2014, visual scouting began to locate and tag P. collina (including other mussels in the community) with PIT …

The Simulation & Evaluation Of Surge Hazard Using A Response Surface Method In The New York Bight, Michael H. Bredesen

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric features, such as tropical cyclones, act as a driving mechanism for many of the major hazards affecting coastal areas around the world. Accurate and efficient quantification of tropical cyclone surge hazard is essential to the development of resilient coastal communities, particularly given continued sea level trend concerns. Recent major tropical cyclones that have impacted the northeastern portion of the United States have resulted in devastating flooding in New York City, the most densely populated city in the US. As a part of national effort to re-evaluate coastal inundation hazards, the Federal Emergency Management Agency used the Joint Probability Method …

Comparison Of Hazard, Odds And Risk Ratio In The Two-Sample Survival Problem, Benedict P. Dormitorio

Dissertations

Cox proportional hazards is the standard method for analyzing treatment efficacy when time-to-event data is available. In the absence of time-to-event, investigators may use logistic regression which only requires relative frequencies of events, or Poisson regression which requires only interval-summarized frequency tables of time-to-event. When event frequencies are used instead of time-to-events, does it always result in a loss in power?

We investigate the relative performance of the three methods. In particular, we compare the power of tests based on the respective effect-size estimates (1)hazard ratio (HR), (2)odds ratio (OR), and (3)risk ratio (RR). We use a variety of survival …

Some New Probability Distributions Based On Random Extrema And Permutation Patterns, Jie Hao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, we study a new family of random variables, that arise as the distribution of extrema of a random number N of independent and identically distributed random variables X₁,X₂, ..., X_N, where each X_i has a common continuous distribution with support on [0,1]. The general scheme is first outlined, and SUG and CSUG models are introduced in detail where X_i is distributed as U[0,1]. Some features of the proposed distributions can be studied via its mean, variance, moments and moment-generating function. Moreover, we make some other choices for …

Pricing And Hedging Index Options With A Dominant Constituent Stock, Helen Cheyne

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this paper, we examine the pricing and hedging of an index option where one constituents stock plays an overly dominant role in the index. Under a Geometric Brownian Motion assumption we compare the distribution of the relative value of the index if the dominant stock is modeled separately from the rest of the index, or not. The former is equivalent to the relative index value being distributed as the sum of two lognormal random variables and the latter is distributed as a single lognormal random variable. Since these are not equal in distribution, we compare the two models. The …

Automating Large-Scale Simulation Calibration To Real-World Sensor Data, Richard Everett Edwards

Doctoral Dissertations

Many key decisions and design policies are made using sophisticated computer simulations. However, these sophisticated computer simulations have several major problems. The two main issues are 1) gaps between the simulation model and the actual structure, and 2) limitations of the modeling engine's capabilities. This dissertation's goal is to address these simulation deficiencies by presenting a general automated process for tuning simulation inputs such that simulation output matches real world measured data. The automated process involves the following key components -- 1) Identify a model that accurately estimates the real world simulation calibration target from measured sensor data; 2) Identify …

Approximate Methods For Dynamic Portfolio Allocation Under Transaction Costs, Nabeel Butt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The thesis provides robust and efficient lattice based algorithms for solving dynamic portfolio allocation problems under transaction costs. The early part of the thesis concentrates upon developing a toolbox based on multinomial trees. The multinomial trees are shown to provide a reasonable approximation for most popular transaction cost models in the academic literature. The tool, once forged, is implemented in the powerful Mathematica based parallel computing environment. In the second part of the thesis we provide applications of our framework to real world problems. We show re-balancing portfolios is more valuable in an investment environment where the growth and volatility …

Using The R Library Rpanel For Gui-Based Simulations In Introductory Statistics Courses, Ryan M. Allison

Statistics

As a student, I noticed that the statistical package R (http://www.r-project.org) would have several benefits of its usage in the classroom. One benefit to the package is its free and open-source nature. This would be a great benefit for instructors and students alike since it would be of no cost to use, unlike other statistical packages. Due to this, students could continue using the program after their statistical courses and into their professional careers. It would be good to expose students while they are in school to a tool that professionals use in industry. R also has powerful …

Modeling And Efficient Estimation Of Intra-Family Correlations, Roy Sabo

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

Familial data occur when observations are taken on multiple members of the same family. Due to relationships between these members, both genetic and by cohabitation, their response variables will likely exhibit some form of dependence. Most of the existing literature models this dependence with an equicorrelated structure. This structure is appropriate when the dependencies between family members are similar, such as in genetic studies, but not in cases where we expect the dependencies to differ, such as behavioral comparisons across different age groups. In this dissertation we first discuss an alternative structure based upon first-order autoregressive correlation. Specifically we create …

A Monte Carlo Model Of Uncertainty In A Deterministic Hazardous Waste Transportation Risk Assessment, Michael A. Cowen

Masters Theses

This thesis is aimed at developing and applying advanced modeling tools in the prediction of risk to the general public from transportation of chemical waste on public highways. The modeling tools developed can then be used to compare alternative waste management scenarios. The application considered is related to the transport of hazardous waste generated by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to current treatment, storage, and disposal facilities. DOE is currently considering four different scenarios.

The application considered can be more specifically defined as an analysis of the risk to the general public from transporting the 63 shipments of …