Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Assessing Spurious Correlations In Big Search Data, Jesse T. Richman, Ryan J. Roberts

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Big search data offers the opportunity to identify new and potentially real-time measures and predictors of important political, geographic, social, cultural, economic, and epidemiological phenomena, measures that might serve an important role as leading indicators in forecasts and nowcasts. However, it also presents vast new risks that scientists or the public will identify meaningless and totally spurious ‘relationships’ between variables. This study is the first to quantify that risk in the context of search data. We find that spurious correlations arise at exceptionally high frequencies among probability distributions examined for random variables based upon gamma (1, 1) and Gaussian random …

Single Row Routing: Theoretical And Experimental Performance Evaluation, And New Heuristic Development, David A. Hysom

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The Single Row Routing Problem (SRRP) is an abstraction arising from real-world multilayer routing concerns. While NP-Complete, development of efficient SRRP routing heuristics are of vital concern to VLSI design. Previously, researchers have introduced various heuristics for SRRP; however, a comprehensive examination of SRRP behavior has been lacking.

We are particularly concerned with the street-congestion minimization constraint, which is agreed to be the constraint of greatest interest to industry. Several theorems stating lower bounds on street congestion are known. We show that these bounds are not tight in general, and argue they may be in error by at least 50% …

Estimating The Parameters Of Truncated Distributions, Mukul Mohan Mittal

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

The problem considered here is the estimation of the parameters of some special truncated distributions. If the sample observations are restricted to the interval {O, T} with T known, then it is well known in the literature that the method of maximum likelihood fails to provide a finite estimate, for the mean of an exponential distribution, whenever the sample mean is greater than T/2 (Deemer and Votaw, 1955, Ann. Math. Statist. 26, 498-504). Not so well known is the nonexistence of the maximum likelihood estimator (m.l.e.), under certain conditions, for the scale parameter of a gamma distribution from a truncated …