Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Online Social Capital: Social Networking Sites' Influence On Civic And Political Engagement, Charles L. Bush

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines how using social networking sites (SNS) is correlated with levels of civic and political engagement of college students at Old Dominion University. Past research has yielded mixed results on the link between online social capital and civic and political engagement. Major limitations of past research include grouping together social networking sites that are substantially different and not considering these sites’ impact on the different forms of social capital. This thesis first examines how social networking site preference, intensity of use, and motives for use factor into an individual’s online social capital. Secondly, this thesis looks at how …

Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person's sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship …

Estimating The Optimal Cutoff Point For Logistic Regression, Zheng Zhang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Binary classification is one of the main themes of supervised learning. This research is concerned about determining the optimal cutoff point for the continuous-scaled outcomes (e.g., predicted probabilities) resulting from a classifier such as logistic regression. We make note of the fact that the cutoff point obtained from various methods is a statistic, which can be unstable with substantial variation. Nevertheless, due partly to complexity involved in estimating the cutpoint, there has been no formal study on the variance or standard error of the estimated cutoff point.

In this Thesis, a bootstrap aggregation method is put forward to estimate the …