Applied Mathematics Commons^™

Hierarchical Bayesian Regression With Application In Spatial Modeling And Outlier Detection, Ghadeer Mahdi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation makes two important contributions to the development of Bayesian hierarchical models. The first contribution is focused on spatial modeling. Spatial data observed on a group of areal units is common in scientific applications. The usual hierarchical approach for modeling this kind of dataset is to introduce a spatial random effect with an autoregressive prior. However, the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for this hierarchical framework requires the spatial effects to be sampled from their full conditional posteriors one-by-one resulting in poor mixing. More importantly, it makes the model computationally inefficient for datasets with large number of units. …

Classifying Textual Fast Food Restaurant Reviews Quantitatively Using Text Mining And Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms, Lindsey Wright

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Companies continually seek to improve their business model through feedback and customer satisfaction surveys. Social media provides additional opportunities for this advanced exploration into the mind of the customer. By extracting customer feedback from social media platforms, companies may increase the sample size of their feedback and remove bias often found in questionnaires, resulting in better informed decision making. However, simply using personnel to analyze the thousands of relative social media content is financially expensive and time consuming. Thus, our study aims to establish a method to extract business intelligence from social media content by structuralizing opinionated textual data using …

Harmonic Functions And Harmonic Measure, David Mcdonald

Honors Scholar Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to give a brief introduction to the field of harmonic measure. In order to do this we first introduce a few important properties of harmonic functions and show how to find a Green’s function for a given domain. Following this we calculate the harmonic measure for some easy cases and end by examining the connection between harmonic measure and Brownian motion.

On The Qualitative Theory Of The Nonlinear Degenerate Second Order Parabolic Equations Modeling Reaction-Diffusion-Convection Processes, Habeeb Abed Kadhim Aal-Rkhais

Theses and Dissertations

We consider nonlinear second order degenerate or singular parabolic equation ut − a(um)xx + buβ + c(up)x = 0, a, m, β, p > 0, b, c ∈ R describing reaction-diffusion-convection processes arising in many areas of science and engineering, such as filtration of oil or gas in porous media, transport of thermal energy in plasma physics, flow of chemically reacting fluid, evolution of populations in mathematical biology etc. We apply the methods developed in U.G. Abdulla, Journal of Differential Equations, 164, 2(2000), 321-354 for the reaction-diffusion equation (c = 0) and prove the existence, uniqueness, boundary regularity and comparison theorems …

The Advection-Diffusion Equation And The Enhanced Dissipation Effect For Flows Generated By Hamiltonians, Michael Kumaresan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We study the Cauchy problem for the advection-diffusion equation when the diffusive parameter is vanishingly small. We consider two cases - when the underlying flow is a shear flow, and when the underlying flow is generated by a Hamiltonian. For the former, we examine the problem on a bounded domain in two spatial variables with Dirichlet boundary conditions. After quantizing the system via the Fourier transform in the first spatial variable, we establish the enhanced-dissipation effect for each mode. For the latter, we allow for non-degenerate critical points and represent the orbits by points on a Reeb graph, with vertices …

Godunov-Type Upwind Flux Schemes Of The Two-Dimensional Finite Volume Discrete Boltzmann Method, Leitao Chen, Laura Schaefer

Publications

A simple unified Godunov-type upwind approach that does not need Riemann solvers for the flux calculation is developed for the finite volume discrete Boltzmann method (FVDBM) on an unstructured cell-centered triangular mesh. With piecewise-constant (PC), piecewise-linear (PL) and piecewise-parabolic (PP) reconstructions, three Godunov-type upwind flux schemes with different orders of accuracy are subsequently derived. After developing both a semi-implicit time marching scheme tailored for the developed flux schemes, and a versatile boundary treatment that is compatible with all of the flux schemes presented in this paper, numerical tests are conducted on spatial accuracy for several single-phase flow problems. Four major …

Homogenization In Perforated Domains And With Soft Inclusions, Brandon C. Russell

Brandon Russell

The Pope's Rhinoceros And Quantum Mechanics, Michael Gulas

Honors Projects

In this project, I unravel various mathematical milestones and relate them to the human experience. I show and explain the solution to the Tautochrone, a popular variation on the Brachistochrone, which details a major battle between Leibniz and Newton for the title of inventor of Calculus. One way to solve the Tautochrone is using Laplace Transforms; in this project I expound on common functions that get transformed and how those can be used to solve the Tautochrone. I then connect the solution of the Tautochrone to clock making. From this understanding of clocks, I examine mankind’s understanding of time and …

Atmospheric Radiation And Tgfs: Unexplained Radiation In Our Skies, Adrian Gallegos

Honors College Research

There is a significant correlation between atmospheric electrification via thunderstorms and the occurrence of large emissions of x-ray and gamma ray radiation known as Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes (TGFs). Some physical phenomenon may be explained by either the RREA or Thermal Runaway models, but the scientific community as a whole is still largely at work on the theoretical frameworks.

Power-Law Scaling Of Extreme Dynamics Near Higher-Order Exceptional Points, Q. Zhong, Demetrios N. Christodoulides, M. Khajavikhan, K. G. Makris, Ramy El-Ganainy

Ramy El-Ganainy

We investigate the extreme dynamics of non-Hermitian systems near higher-order exceptional points in photonic networks constructed using the bosonic algebra method. We show that strong power oscillations for certain initial conditions can occur as a result of the peculiar eigenspace geometry and its dimensionality collapse near these singularities. By using complementary numerical and analytical approaches, we show that, in the parity-time (PT) phase near exceptional points, the logarithm of the maximum optical power amplification scales linearly with the order of the exceptional point. We focus in our discussion on photonic systems, but we note that our results apply to other …

Cross-Participant Eeg-Based Assessment Of Cognitive Workload Using Multi-Path Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks, Ryan G. Hefron, Brett J. Borghetti, Christine M. Schubert Kabban, James Christensen, Justin Estep

Faculty Publications

Applying deep learning methods to electroencephalograph (EEG) data for cognitive state assessment has yielded improvements over previous modeling methods. However, research focused on cross-participant cognitive workload modeling using these techniques is underrepresented. We study the problem of cross-participant state estimation in a non-stimulus-locked task environment, where a trained model is used to make workload estimates on a new participant who is not represented in the training set. Using experimental data from the Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) environment, a variety of deep neural network models are evaluated in the trade-space of computational efficiency, model accuracy, variance and temporal specificity yielding three …

Properties And Computation Of The Inverse Of The Gamma Function, Folitse Komla Amenyou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We explore the approximation formulas for the inverse function of Γ. The inverse function of Γ is a multivalued function and must be computed branch by branch. We compare three approximations for the principal branch Γ̌ 0 . Plots and numerical values show that the choice of the approximation depends on the domain of the arguments, specially for small arguments. We also investigate some iterative schemes and find that the Inverse Quadratic Interpolation scheme is better than Newton’s scheme for improving the initial approximation. We introduce the contours technique for extending a real-valued function into the complex plane using two …

Simplicity And Sustainability: Pointers From Ethics And Science, Mehrdad Massoudi, Ashwin Vaidya

Department of Mathematics Facuty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper, we explore the notion of simplicity. We use definitions of simplicity proposed by philosophers, scientists, and economists. In an age when the rapidly growing human population faces an equally rapidly declining energy/material resources, there is an urgent need to consider various notions of simplicity, collective and individual, which we believe to be a sensible path to restore our planet to a reasonable state of health. Following the logic of mathematicians and physicists, we suggest that simplicity can be related to sustainability. Our efforts must therefore not be spent so much in pursuit of growth but in achieving …

The Urban Black Male: Early Indicators Of Algebra 1 Failure, Roy Harris

Scholar Week 2016 - present

The meager mathematical performance of the Black male student has been a well-documented event that was well over 30 years in the making. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the literature on 9^th grade urban Black male algebra performance and to identify the existence of any early predictors of high school algebra 1 failure. Specifically, the study sought to identify any difference in the preferred learning styles, mathematics self-efficacy scores, and standardized test scores, among urban Black males 14-16 years who passed high school algebra 1 1^st semester of the 2016-2017 school year and urban …

Uncertainty Evaluation In The Design Of Structural Health Monitoring Systems For Damage Detection, Christine M. Schubert Kabban, Richard P. Uber, Kevin J. Lin, Bin Lin, M. Bhuiyan, Victor Giurgiutiu

Faculty Publications

The validation of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems for aircraft is complicated by the extent and number of factors that the SHM system must demonstrate for robust performance. Therefore, a time- and cost-efficient method for examining all of the sensitive factors must be conducted. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of using the simulation modeling environment to determine the SHM sensitive factors that must be considered for subsequent experiments, in order to enable the SHM validation. We demonstrate this concept by examining the effect of SHM system configuration and flaw characteristics on the response of a signal from a …

An Area Based Fan Beam Projection Model, Richard E. Steele, Jiehua Zhu

Honors College Theses

Area based projection models for computed tomography mitigate raw data errors by treating X-Rays as beams, whereas traditional line based projection models treat an X-Ray like a line, thus generating significant error. In an existing area based fan beam projection model, a rotation matrix, Q, simulates the rotation of the emitter detector pair to reduce computational load, but this introduces approximations by using an approximated rotation matrix. We eliminate approximations by deriving an exact formula for the entries of Q. Using a rotation of axes and by considering the neighboring cells' contributions to the area, the result has formulations for …

Saving Olivet Money With Creation Care, Nicholas Boros

Scholar Week 2016 - present

Universities throughout the United States are searching for ways to reduce overhead costs, to help combat rises in tuition costs. Typically, one would think that installing solar panels on campus to help generate electricity would cost Olivet money, especially since the University is located in the Midwest. While such an undertaking would require an upfront investment, we will discuss how solar panels could save the University as much as $500,000 to $800,000 per year after an approximate 10 year break even point. We will also briefly discuss how similar approaches could be applied to other businesses and homes for a …

Using Random Forests To Describe Equity In Higher Education: A Critical Quantitative Analysis Of Utah’S Postsecondary Pipelines, Tyler Mcdaniel

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

The following work examines the Random Forest (RF) algorithm as a tool for predicting student outcomes and interrogating the equity of postsecondary education pipelines. The RF model, created using longitudinal data of 41,303 students from Utah's 2008 high school graduation cohort, is compared to logistic and linear models, which are commonly used to predict college access and success. Substantially, this work finds High School GPA to be the best predictor of postsecondary GPA, whereas commonly used ACT and AP test scores are not nearly as important. Each model identified several demographic disparities in higher education access, most significantly the effects …

Mathematical Modeling Of Tumor Immune Interactions: A Closer Look At The Role Of A Pd-L1 Inhibitor In Cancer Immunotherapy, Ami Radunskaya, Ruby Kim, Timothy Woods Ii

Spora: A Journal of Biomathematics

Monoclonal antibodies have shown promising results as a form of cancer immunotherapy used either alone or in combination with another treatment. We model a monoclonal antibody in combination with a dendritic cell (DC) vaccine in order to study treatment optimization. Certain proteins on tumor cells allow the tumor cells to bind to specific receptors on immune cells, rendering the immune cells ineffective. Experiments using mouse models show that a combination of antibodies to these proteins with tumor suppressing drugs improves the effectiveness of cancer vaccines. We create independent models of each of the two treatments in combination with DC therapy, …

Consensus And Clustering In Opinion Formation On Networks, Julia Bujalski, Grace Dwyer, Todd Kapitula, Quang Nhat Le

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Ideas that challenge the status quo either evaporate or dominate. The study of opinion dynamics in the socio-physics literature treats space as uniform and considers individuals in an isolated community, using ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. We extend these ODE models to include multiple communities and their interactions. These extended ODE models can be thought of as being ODEs on directed graphs. We study in detail these models to determine conditions under which there will be consensus and pluralism within the system. Most of the consensus/pluralism analysis is done for the case of one and two cities. However, we numerically …