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Mind Maps And Machine Learning: An Automation Framework For Qualitative Research In Entrepreneurship Education, Yasser Farha

Dissertations

Entrepreneurship Education researchers often measure entrepreneurial motivation of college students. It is important for stakeholders, such as policymakers and educators, to assert if entrepreneurship education can encourage students to become entrepreneurs, as well as to understand factors that influence entrepreneurial motivation. For that purpose, researchers have used different methods and instruments to measure students' entrepreneurial motivation. Most of these methods are quantitative, e.g., closed-ended surveys, whereas qualitative methods, e.g., open-ended surveys, are rarely used.

Mind maps are an attractive qualitative survey tool because they capture the individual's reflections, thoughts, and experiences. For Entrepreneurship Education, mind maps can be utilized to …

Predicting Attrition - A Driver For Creating Value, Realizing Strategy, And Refining Key Hr Processes, Kevin Mendonsa, Maureen Stolberg, Vivek Viswanathan, Scott Crum

SMU Data Science Review

Talent is the most important asset for every organization's success. While attrition (or churn) and turnover can refer to both employees and customers, this paper will focus on employee attrition only. Many organizations accept attrition as an inevitable cost of doing business and do nothing to adopt or implement mitigating strategies to combat it. World class companies on the other hand take deliberate measures to understand, control and mitigate attrition (turnover) at every stage. Unmitigated attrition can have a devastating effect on an organization's bottom line and market value. In addition, the “invisible" costs of low employee morale, reduced employee …

Comparison Of Machine Learning Models: Gesture Recognition Using A Multimodal Wrist Orthosis For Tetraplegics, Charlie Martin

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Many tetraplegics must wear wrist braces to support paralyzed wrists and hands. However, current wrist orthoses have limited functionality to assist a person’s ability to perform typical activities of daily living other than a small pocket to hold utensils. To enhance the functionality of wrist orthoses, gesture recognition technology can be applied to control mechatronic tools attached to a novel fabricated wrist brace. Gesture recognition is a growing technology for providing touchless human-computer interaction that can be particularly useful for tetraplegics with limited upper-extremity mobility. In this study, three gesture recognition models were compared—two dynamic time-warping models and a hidden …

Machine Learning And Deep Learning Based Entity Resolution Approaches For Unstructured References, Xinming Li

Theses and Dissertations

As a fundamental task in data integration and data quality, Entity Resolution (ER) has been investigated for decades in various domains. The emerging volume of heterogeneously structured data, and even unstructured data, poses a challenge to traditional ER methods. This research is to explore machine learning and deep learning approach to address the challenge from unstructured references data. This research starts with pairwise matching, the core function of all ER tasks. Based on the similarity score vector derived from our designed similarity measurement tool, scoring matrix, machine leaning enhances the performance significantly compared to the manually threshold method. Without similarity …

Arlegislation: An R Package Of Arkansas Legislation Data And An Exploratory Use Case For Using Machine Learning To Identify Public Corruption, Nathan P. Chaney

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes the creation of a natural-language dataset from a corpus of legislation passed in the State of Arkansas between 2001 and 2019. The dataset also includes metadata about individual acts of legislation and the lawmakers who sponsored them. This thesis describes the creation of the dataset, including the transformation of raw textual input using various natural language processing techniques such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling. Finally, this thesis examines a use case for identifying corrupt lawmakers using machine learning tools trained on transformations of the dataset.

Open Set Classification For Deep Learning In Large-Scale And Continual Learning Models, Ryne Roady

Theses

Supervised classification methods often assume the train and test data distributions are the same and that all classes in the test set are present in the training set. However, deployed classifiers require the ability to recognize inputs from outside the training set as unknowns and update representations in near real-time to account for novel concepts unknown during offline training. This problem has been studied under multiple paradigms including out-of-distribution detection and open set recognition; however, for convolutional neural networks, there have been two major approaches: 1) inference methods to separate known inputs from unknown inputs and 2) feature space regularization …

Deep Learning To Predict Ocean Seabed Type And Source Parameters, David Franklin Van Komen

Theses and Dissertations

In the ocean, light from the surface dissipates quickly leaving sound the only way to see at a distance. Different sediment types on the ocean floor and water properties like salinity, temperature, and ocean depth all change how sound travels across long distances. Hard sediment types, such as sand and bedrock, are highly reflective while softer sediment types, such as mud, are more absorptive and change the received sound upon arrival. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the ocean floor is not mapped and the expenses involved in creating such a map are far too great. Traditional signal processing methods in …

Machine Learning Uncovers The Most Robust Self-Report Predictors Of Relationship Quality Across 43 Longitudinal Couples Studies, Samantha Joel, Paul W. Eastwick, Colleen J. Allison, Ximena B. Arriaga, Laura B. Luchies

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e., Random Forests) to 1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and 2) identify which constructs reliably predict relationship quality. Across 43 dyadic longitudinal datasets from 29 laboratories, the top relationship-specific predictors of relationship quality were perceived-partner commitment, appreciation, sexual satisfaction, perceived-partner satisfaction, and conflict. The top individual-difference predictors were life satisfaction, negative affect, depression, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety. Overall, relationship-specific variables predicted …

Flight Data Of Airplane For Wind Forecasting, Astha Sharma

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This research solely focuses on understanding and predicting weather behavior, which is one of the important factors that affect airplanes in flight. The future weather information is used for informing pilots about changing flight conditions. In this paper, we present a new approach towards forecasting one component of weather information, wind speed, from data captured by airplanes in flight. We compare NASA’s ACT-America project against NOAA’s Wind Aloft program for prediction suitability. A collinearity analysis between these datasets reveals better model performance and smaller test error with NASA’s dataset. We then apply machine learning and a genetic algorithm to process …

Query-Driven Global Graph Attention Model For Visual Parsing: Recognizing Handwritten And Typeset Math Formulas, Mahshad Mahdavi

Theses

We present a new visual parsing method based on standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for handwritten and typeset mathematical formulas. The Query-Driven Global Graph Attention (QD-GGA) parser employs multi-task learning, using a single feature representation for locating, classifying, and relating symbols. QD-GGA parses formulas by first constructing a Line-Of-Sight (LOS) graph over the input primitives (e.g handwritten strokes or connected components in images). Second, class distributions for LOS nodes and edges are obtained using query-specific feature filters (i.e., attention) in a single feed-forward pass. This allows end-to-end structure learning using a joint loss over primitive node and edge class distributions. …

Towards Generation Of Creative Software Requirements, Quoc Anh Do Jr

Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly competitive software industry, where multiple systems serve the same application domain and compete for customers, favors software with creative features. To promote software creativity, research has proposed multi-day workshops with experienced facilitators, and semi-automated tools to provide a limited support for creative thinking. Such approach is either time consuming and demands substantial involvement from analysts with creative abilities, or useful only for existing large-scale software with a rich issue tracking system. In this dissertation, we present different approaches leveraging advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques to provide automated support for generating creative software requirements with minimal human …

Smarter Simulation Placement Of Kilonova Light Curve Models For Computationally Inexpensive Surrogate Model Creation, Marko Ristic

Theses

The first detected binary neutron star merger GW170817 allowed for the simultaneous detection of gravitational and electromagnetic waves which started the era of multi-messenger astrophysics. The existence of an electromagnetic counterpart to a compact object merger allowed for a significantly deeper analysis of the merger event and much tighter resultant constraints on existing physical models of neutron stars, nuclear physics, and the Universe itself.

Multi-messenger analysis requires sophisticated source modeling. For the foreseeable future, demanding computational resource costs will result in a sparse availability of state-of-the-art neutron star merger light curve simulations. Astrophysical inference can proceed using an alternate approach …

Semi-Steady-State Jaya Algorithm For Optimization, Uday K. Chakraborty

Educator Preparation & Leadership Faculty Works

The Jaya algorithm is arguably one of the fastest-emerging metaheuristics amongst the newest members of the evolutionary computation family. The present paper proposes a new, improved Jaya algorithm by modifying the update strategies of the best and the worst members in the population. Simulation results on a twelve-function benchmark test-suite and a real-world problem show that the proposed strategy produces results that are better and faster in the majority of cases. Statistical tests of significance are used to validate the performance improvement.

Semi-Steady-State Jaya Algorithm For Optimization, Uday K. Chakraborty

Computer Science Faculty Works

The Jaya algorithm is arguably one of the fastest-emerging metaheuristics amongst the newest members of the evolutionary computation family. The present paper proposes a new, improved Jaya algorithm by modifying the update strategies of the best and the worst members in the population. Simulation results on a twelve-function benchmark test-suite and a real-world problem show that the proposed strategy produces results that are better and faster in the majority of cases. Statistical tests of significance are used to validate the performance improvement.

Mammography Image Bi-Rads Classification Using Ohplall, Bob Vanderheyden, Ying Xie

OHPL Publications

Medical image analysis and classification, using machine learning, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks, have demonstrated a great deal of success. Research into mammography image classification tended to focus on either binary outcome (malignancy or benign) or nominal (unordered) classification for multiclass labels [1]. The industry standard metric for radiologist’s classification of mammography images is a rating scale called BI-RADS (Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System), where values 1 through 5 are a distinct progression of assessment that are intended to denote higher risk of a malignancy, based on the characteristics of anomalies within an image [1][2][3]. The development of a classifier …

In Situ Sensor Calibration Using Noise Consistency, Shriiesh Var Sharma

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Robots rely on sensors to map their surroundings. As a result, the accuracy of the map depends heavily on the sensor noise and in particular on accurate knowledge of it. The common way to minimize the impact of sensor noise is to use filtering algorithms. Accuracy of these filtering algorithms (like the Kalman filter) relies on the accuracy of the user supplied measurement noise model. Inaccurate noise models lead to higher residual noise in state estimates and errors in the estimate of the precision of the state estimate. It is therefore important to have precise noise models and thus accurately …

Classification Of Factual And Non-Factual Statements Using Adversarially Trained Lstm Networks, Daniel Obembe

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Being able to determine which statements are factual and therefore likely candidates for further verification is a key value-add in any automated fact-checking system. For this task, it has been shown that LSTMs outperform regular machine learning models, such as SVMs. However, the complexity of LSTMs can also result in over fitting (Gal and Ghahramani,1997), leading to poorer performance as models fail to generalize. To resolve this issue, we set out to utilize adversarial training as away to improve the performance of LSTMs for the task of classifying statements as factual or non-factual. In our experiment, we implement the adversarial …

Person Identification And Tinetti Score Assessment Using Balance Parameters To Determine Fall Risk, Varsha Rani Chawan

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

This thesis is aimed at a substantial health problem among the elderly population that is “Fall”, a major cause of accidental home deaths. Studies show approximately one-third of community-dwelling people over 65 years of age will experience one or more falls each year. The balance and walking pattern are useful to determine the risk of fall in an individual and is highly influenced by several parameters and conditions. The deterioration in the balance and walking stability of an individual can occur because of the natural processes related to aging or as a result of various underlying health conditions, fatigue, muscle …

Predictive Insights For Improving The Resilience Of Global Food Security Using Artificial Intelligence, Meng Leong How, Yong Jiet Chan, Sin Mei Cheah

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Unabated pressures on food systems affect food security on a global scale. A human-centric artificial intelligence-based probabilistic approach is used in this paper to perform a unified analysis of data from the Global Food Security Index (GFSI). The significance of this intuitive probabilistic reasoning approach for predictive forecasting lies in its simplicity and user-friendliness to people who may not be trained in classical computer science or in software programming. In this approach, predictive modeling using a counterfactual probabilistic reasoning analysis of the GFSI dataset can be utilized to reveal the interplay and tensions between the variables that underlie food affordability, …

Analyzing The Fractal Dimension Of Various Musical Pieces, Nathan Clark

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

One of the most common tools for evaluating data is regression. This technique, widely used by industrial engineers, explores linear relationships between predictors and the response. Each observation of the response is a fixed linear combination of the predictors with an added error element. The method is built on the assumption that this error is normally distributed across all observations and has a mean of zero. In some cases, it has been found that the inherent variation is not the result of a random variable, but is instead the result of self-symmetric properties of the observations. For data with these …

Efficient Construction And Explanation Of Machine Learning Models Through Database Techniques, Sona Hasani

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Machine learning (ML) has been widely adopted in the last few years and it has had an undeniable impact on the ways many organizations make decisions. While great advances have been made in developing new ML algorithms and applications, there is a major need for scalable ML solutions in order to meet the demands of the Big data era. In this dissertation, we focus on improving the efficiency of two main machine learning solutions through database techniques: i) efficient construction of machine learning models, and ii) efficient explanation of machine learning models for multiple predictions. First, we introduce application of …

Development And Identification Of Metrics To Predict The Impact Of Dimension Reduction Techniques On Classical Machine Learning Algorithms For Still Highway Images, Wasim Akram Khan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We are witnessing an influx of data - images, texts, video, etc. Their high dimensionality and large volume make it challenging to apply machine learning to obtain actionable insight. This thesis explores several aspects pertaining to dimensional reduction: dimension reduction methods, metrics to measure distortion, image preprocessing, etc. Faster training and inference time on reduced data and smaller models which can be deployed on commodity hardware are a critical advantage of dimension reduction. For this study, classical machine learning methods were explored owing to their solid mathematical foundation and interpretability.

The dataset used is a time series of images from …

Cloud Resource Prediction Using Explainable And Cooperative Artificial Neural Networks, Nathan R. Nelson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This work proposes a system for predicting cloud resource utilization by using runtime assembled cooperative artificial neural networks (RACANN). RACANN breaks up the problem into smaller contexts, each represented by a small-scale artificial neural network (ANN). The relevant ANNs are joined together at runtime when the context is present in the data for training and predictions. By analyzing the structure of a complete ANN, the influence of inputs is calculated and used to create linguistic descriptions (LD) of model behavior, so RACANN becomes explainable (eRACANN). The predictive results of eRACANN are compared against its prototype and a single deep ANN …

Computer Vision Methods For Sign Language And Cognitive Evaluation Through Physical Tasks, Alex J. Dillhoff

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Analyzing human motion is vital for a multitude of tasks including human-computer interaction, sign language recognition, and the assessment of cognitive disorders. Providing automatic assessments for cognitive disorders increases the accessibility and affordability of life-changing tests and treatments. For sign language recognition, automated translation systems bridge the gap between native and non-native signers. Additionally, dictionary look-up systems are helpful for native signers learning a new language. Common to both of these tasks is the reliance of fine motor function in the hands. Hand Pose Estimation methods are used to drive applications that rely on hand shape. These tasks present unique …

Gaining Computational Insight Into Psychological Data: Applications Of Machine Learning With Eating Disorders And Autism Spectrum Disorder, Natalia Rosenfield

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Over the past 100 years, assessment tools have been developed that allow us to explore mental and behavioral processes that could not be measured before. However, conventional statistical models used for psychological data are lacking in thoroughness and predictability. This provides a perfect opportunity to use machine learning to study the data in a novel way. In this paper, we present examples of using machine learning techniques with data in three areas: eating disorders, body satisfaction, and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We explore clustering algorithms as well as virtual reality (VR).

Our first study employs the k-means clustering algorithm to …

Learning Health Information From Floor Sensor Data Within A Pervasive Smart Home Environment, Nicholas Brent Burns

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Spatial and temporal gait analysis can provide useful measures for determining a person’s state of health while also identifying deviations in day-to-day activity. The SmartCare project is a multi-discipline health technologies project that aims to provide an unobtrusive and pervasive system that provides in-home health monitoring for the elderly. This research work focuses on the pressure-sensitive smart floor of the SmartCare project by using an experimental floor to develop methods for future use on a floor deployed within a home. This work presents a procedure to automatically calibrate a smart floor’s pressure sensors without specialized physical effort. The calibration algorithm …

Hand-Over-Face Segmentation, Sakher Ghanem

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Accurate hand segmentation is vital in many applications in which the hands play a central role, such as sign language recognition, action recognition, and gesture recognition. A relatively unexplored obstacle to correct hand segmentation is when the hand overlaps the face. The shortage of a dataset for this research area has been one motivation for this work. However, this dissertation investigates and proposes improvements for the hand-over-face segmentation task. Toward an in-depth study of the hand segmentation problem, the work presented in this dissertation will yield several contributions. First, it introduces a survey on sign language recognition systems using mobile …

Applications Of Artificial Intelligence And Graphy Theory To Cyberbullying, Jesse D. Simpson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Cyberbullying is an ongoing and devastating issue in today's online social media. Abusive users engage in cyber-harassment by utilizing social media to send posts, private messages, tweets, or pictures to innocent social media users. Detecting and preventing cases of cyberbullying is crucial. In this work, I analyze multiple machine learning, deep learning, and graph analysis algorithms and explore their applicability and performance in pursuit of a robust system for detecting cyberbullying. First, I evaluate the performance of the machine learning algorithms Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, Decision Tree, and Logistic Regression. This yielded positive results and obtained upwards …

A Sense Of Scale: Mapping Exotic Annual Grasses With Satellite Imagery Across A Landscape And Quantifying Their Biomass At A Plot Level With Structure-From-Motion In A Semi-Arid Ecosystem, Monica Vermillion

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The native vegetation communities in the sagebrush steppe, a semi-arid ecosystem type, are under threat from exotic annual grasses. Exotic annual grasses increase fire severity and frequency, decrease biodiversity, and reduce soil carbon storage amongst other ecosystem services. The invasion of exotic annual grasses is causing detrimental impacts to land use by eliminating forage for livestock and creating a huge economic cost from fire control and post-fire restoration. To combat invasion, land managers need to know what exotic annual grasses are present, where they are invading, and estimates of their biomass. Mapping exotic annual grasses is challenging because many areas …

A 30-Year Agroclimatic Analysis Of The Snake River Valley American Viticultural Area - Descriptive And Predictive Methods, Charles L. Becker

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Climate change poses serious threats to global agriculture, however some localities and crops may benefit from increasing temperatures. Grape production in southern Idaho may be a beneficial example as vineyard acreage has increased over 300% since the designation of the Snake River American Viticultural Area (SRVAVA) in 2007. We perform a statistical characterization of agroclimate within the SRVAVA that centers around four primary objectives: utilization of a novel, 30-year high resolution climate dataset to provide insight and agrometrics unavailable at coarser resolutions, climatic implications of the unique topography within the SRVAVA, identification of statistical trends, and correlation of SRVAVA climate …