Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Variation In Personality Among Semi-Wild Myanmar Timber Elephants, Sateesh Venkatesh

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines two personality traits: exploration and neophobia, which could influence human-elephant conflicts. Thirty-one semi-wild elephants were tested over two trials using a custom novel puzzle tube containing three tasks and three rewards. Our studies show that elephants do vary significantly between individuals in both exploration and neophobia.

Conceptualization And Application Of Deep Learning And Applied Statistics For Flight Plan Recommendation, Nicholas C. Forrest

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Forces Pilot Training Next (PTN) program seeks a more efficient pilot training environment emphasizing the use of virtual reality flight simulators alongside periodic real aircraft experience. The PTN program wants to accelerate the training pace and progress in undergraduate pilot training compared to traditional undergraduate pilot training. Currently, instructor pilots spend excessive time planning and scheduling flights. This research focuses on methods to auto-generate the planning of in-flight events using hybrid filtering and deep learning techniques. The resulting approach captures temporal trends of user-specific and program-wide student performance to recommend a feasible set of graded flight events for …

Ground Weather Radar Signal Characterization Through Application Of Convolutional Neural Networks, Stephen M. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

The 45th Weather Squadron supports the space launch efforts out of the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for the Department of Defense, NASA, and commercial customers through weather assessments. Their assessment of the Lightning Launch Commit Criteria (LLCC) for avoidance of natural and rocket triggered lightning to launch vehicles is critical in approving space shuttle and rocket launches. The LLCC includes standards for cloud formations, which requires proper cloud identification and characterization methods. Accurate reflectivity measurements for ground weather radar are important to meet the LLCC for rocket triggered lightning. Current linear interpolation methods for ground …

An Analysis Of A Lighting Prediction Threshold For 45th Weather Squadron Electric Field Mill Data, Charles A. Skrovan

Theses and Dissertations

The mission of the 45th Weather Squadron (45 WS) is to “exploit the weather to assure safe access to air and space” for Patrick Air Force Base, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), and Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in support of various operations (United States Air Force, n.d.). To support that mission the 45 WS hosts a suite of weather detection instruments that include a lightning warning system that consists of an array of 31 electric field mills (EFM) and a lightning detection and ranging system (Department of the Air Force, 1976). Electric field mills at Cape Canaveral continuously record …

The Analysis Of Neural Heterogeneity Through Mathematical And Statistical Methods, Kyle Wendling

Theses and Dissertations

Diversity of intrinsic neural attributes and network connections is known to exist in many areas of the brain and is thought to significantly affect neural coding. Recent theoretical and experimental work has argued that in uncoupled networks, coding is most accurate at intermediate levels of heterogeneity. I explore this phenomenon through two distinct approaches: a theoretical mathematical modeling approach and a data-driven statistical modeling approach.

Through the mathematical approach, I examine firing rate heterogeneity in a feedforward network of stochastic neural oscillators utilizing a high-dimensional model. The firing rate heterogeneity stems from two sources: intrinsic (different individual cells) and network …

Zero-Inflated Longitudinal Mixture Model For Stochastic Radiographic Lung Compositional Change Following Radiotherapy Of Lung Cancer, Viviana A. Rodríguez Romero

Theses and Dissertations

Compositional data (CD) is mostly analyzed as relative data, using ratios of components, and log-ratio transformations to be able to use known multivariable statistical methods. Therefore, CD where some components equal zero represent a problem. Furthermore, when the data is measured longitudinally, observations are spatially related and appear to come from a mixture population, the analysis becomes highly complex. For this matter, a two-part model was proposed to deal with structural zeros in longitudinal CD using a mixed-effects model. Furthermore, the model has been extended to the case where the non-zero components of the vector might a two component mixture …

Phenotype Extraction: Estimation And Biometrical Genetic Analysis Of Individual Dynamics, Kevin L. Mckee

Theses and Dissertations

Within-person data can exhibit a virtually limitless variety of statistical patterns, but it can be difficult to distinguish meaningful features from statistical artifacts. Studies of complex traits have previously used genetic signals like twin-based heritability to distinguish between the two. This dissertation is a collection of studies applying state-space modeling to conceptualize and estimate novel phenotypic constructs for use in psychiatric research and further biometrical genetic analysis. The aims are to: (1) relate control theoretic concepts to health-related phenotypes; (2) design statistical models that formally define those phenotypes; (3) estimate individual phenotypic values from time series data; (4) consider hierarchical …