Numerical Analysis and Computation Commons^™

Fitting A Covid-19 Model Incorporating Senses Of Safety And Caution To Local Data From Spartanburg County, South Carolina, D. Chloe Griffin, Amanda Mangum

CODEE Journal

Common mechanistic models include Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) and Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Removed (SEIR) models. These models in their basic forms have generally failed to capture the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic's multiple waves and do not take into account public policies such as social distancing, mask mandates, and the ``Stay-at-Home'' orders implemented in early 2020. While the Susceptible-Vaccinated-Infected-Recovered-Deceased (SVIRD) model only adds two more compartments to the SIR model, the inclusion of time-dependent parameters allows for the model to better capture the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic when surveillance testing was common practice for a large portion of the population. We find …

Quantifying The Carbon Stored And Sequestered By The Trees On Pomona College’S Campus, Paola A. Giron-Carson

Scripps Senior Theses

We are experiencing a climate crisis that must be confronted with strategic mitigation. Pomona College contributes to the climate crisis through its emissions for which there is a baseline record. However there is no baseline record of the climate mitigation currently performed by the trees on Pomona’s campus through carbon storage. This study seeks to determine a current baseline quantity of carbon stored and sequestrated by Pomona’s trees as well as possible courses of climate mitigation for Pomona College to take. Initial information gathering was conducted through interviews with several stakeholders. This study was conducted using data collected prior to …

Academic Hats And Ice Cream: Two Optimization Problems, Valery F. Ochkov, Yulia V. Chudova

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article describes the use of computer software to optimize the design of an academic hat and an ice cream cone!

The Nature Of Numbers: Real Computing, Bradley J. Lucier

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

While studying the computable real numbers as a professional mathematician, I came to see the computable reals, and not the real numbers as usually presented in undergraduate real analysis classes, as the natural culmination of my evolving understanding of numbers as a schoolchild. This paper attempts to trace and explain that evolution. The first part recounts the nature of numbers as they were presented to us grade-school children. In particular, the introduction of square roots induced a step change in my understanding of numbers. Another incident gave me insight into the brilliance of Alan Turing in his paper introducing both …

Check Yourself Before You Wrek Yourself: Unpacking And Generalizing Randomized Extended Kaczmarz, William Gilroy

HMC Senior Theses

Linear systems are fundamental in many areas of science and engineering. With the advent of computers there now exist extremely large linear systems that we are interested in. Such linear systems lend themselves to iterative methods. One such method is the family of algorithms called Randomized Kaczmarz methods.
Among this family, there exists a Randomized Kaczmarz variant called Randomized
Extended Kaczmarz which solves for least squares solutions in inconsistent linear systems.
Among Kaczmarz variants, Randomized Extended Kaczmarz is unique in that it modifies input system in a special way to solve for the least squares solution. In this work we …

Dynamic Nonlinear Gaussian Model For Inferring A Graph Structure On Time Series, Abhinuv Uppal

CMC Senior Theses

In many applications of graph analytics, the optimal graph construction is not always straightforward. I propose a novel algorithm to dynamically infer a graph structure on multiple time series by first imposing a state evolution equation on the graph and deriving the necessary equations to convert it into a maximum likelihood optimization problem. The state evolution equation guarantees that edge weights contain predictive power by construction. After running experiments on simulated data, it appears the required optimization is likely non-convex and does not generally produce results significantly better than randomly tweaking parameters, so it is not feasible to use in …

Modelling The Transition From Homogeneous To Columnar States In Locust Hopper Bands, Miguel Velez

HMC Senior Theses

Many biological systems form structured swarms, for instance in locusts, whose swarms are known as hopper bands. There is growing interest in applying mathematical models to understand the emergence and dynamics of these biological and social systems. We model the locusts of a hopper band as point particles interacting through repulsive and attractive social "forces" on a one dimensional periodic domain. The primary goal of this work is to modify this well studied modelling framework to be more biological by restricting repulsion to act locally between near neighbors, while attraction acts globally between all individuals. This is a biologically motivated …

Fractals, Fractional Derivatives, And Newton-Like Methods, Eleanor Byrnes

HMC Senior Theses

Inspired by the fractals generated by the discretizations of the Continuous Newton Method and the notion of a fractional derivative, we ask what it would mean if such a fractional derivative were to replace the derivatives in Newton's Method. This work, largely experimental in nature, examines these new iterative methods by generating their Julia sets, computing their fractal dimension, and in certain tractable cases examining the behaviors using tools from dynamical systems.

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

An Exploration Of 5g Wireless Network Attenuation Using Finite Element Analysis In Comsol Multiphysics, Matthew Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

5G, ultra-high frequency wireless networks face numerous hurdles due to significant signal attenuation in materials and large path loss. Empirical research on signal attenuation has been limited to low frequencies or very select high frequencies. This paper utilizes Finite Element Analysis in COMSOL Multiphysics to analyze signal attenuation in materials over a range of the frequency spectrum, from 100Mhz to 40Ghz, which is inclusive of 5G wireless frequencies. The focus of this paper is on glass and dry wood, as well as wet wood (representative of trees), as these materials are some of the most likely to stand in the …

Randomized Algorithms For Preconditioner Selection With Applications To Kernel Regression, Conner Dipaolo

HMC Senior Theses

The task of choosing a preconditioner M to use when solving a linear system Ax=b with iterative methods is often tedious and most methods remain ad-hoc. This thesis presents a randomized algorithm to make this chore less painful through use of randomized algorithms for estimating traces. In particular, we show that the preconditioner stability || I - M^-1A ||_F, known to forecast preconditioner quality, can be computed in the time it takes to run a constant number of iterations of conjugate gradients through use of sketching methods. This is in spite of folklore which …

Boundary Homogenization And Capture Time Distributions Of Semipermeable Membranes With Periodic Patterns Of Reactive Sites, Andrew J. Bernoff, Daniel Schmidt, Alan E. Lindsay

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

We consider the capture dynamics of a particle undergoing a random walk in a half- space bounded by a plane with a periodic pattern of absorbing pores. In particular, we numerically measure and asymptotically characterize the distribution of capture times. Numerically we develop a kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) method that exploits exact solutions to create an efficient particle- based simulation of the capture time that deals with the infinite half-space exactly and has a run time that is independent of how far from the pores one begins. Past researchers have proposed homogenizing the surface boundary conditions, replacing the reflecting (Neumann) …

Numerical Approximation Of Diffusive Capture Rates By Planar And Spherical Surfaces With Absorbing Pores, Andrew J. Bernoff, Alan E. Lindsay

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

In 1977 Berg and Purcell published a landmark paper entitled Physics of Chemore- ception, which examined how a bacterium can sense a chemical attractant in the fluid surrounding it [H. C. Berg and E. M. Purcell, Biophys J, 20 (1977), pp. 193–219]. At small scales the attrac- tant molecules move by Brownian motion and diffusive processes dominate. This example is the archetype of diffusive signaling problems where an agent moves via a random walk until it either strikes or eludes a target. Berg and Purcell modeled the target as a sphere with a set of small circular targets (pores) that …

Computing Eigenmodes Of Elliptic Operators On Manifolds Using Radial Basis Functions, Vladimir Delengov

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In this work, a numerical approach based on meshless methods is proposed to obtain eigenmodes of Laplace-Beltrami operator on manifolds, and its performance is compared against existing alternative methods. Radial Basis Function (RBF)-based methods allow one to obtain interpolation and differentiation matrices easily by using scattered data points. We derive expressions for such matrices for the Laplace-Beltrami operator via so-called Reilly’s formulas and use them to solve the respective eigenvalue problem. Numerical studies of proposed methods are performed in order to demonstrate convergence on simple examples of one-dimensional curves and two-dimensional surfaces.

Decoding Book Barcode Images, Yizhou Tao

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis investigated a method of barcode reconstruction to address the recovery of a blurred and convoluted one-dimensional barcode. There are a lot of types of barcodes used today, such as Code 39, Code 93, Code 128, etc. Our algorithm applies to the universal barcode, EAN 13. We extend the methodologies proposed by Iwen et al. (2013) in the journal article "A Symbol-Based Algorithm for Decoding barcodes." The algorithm proposed in the paper requires a signal measured by a laser scanner as an input. The observed signal is modeled as a true signal corrupted by a Gaussian convolution, additional noises, …

Kinetic Monte Carlo Methods For Computing First Capture Time Distributions In Models Of Diffusive Absorption, Daniel Schmidt

HMC Senior Theses

In this paper, we consider the capture dynamics of a particle undergoing a random walk above a sheet of absorbing traps. In particular, we seek to characterize the distribution in time from when the particle is released to when it is absorbed. This problem is motivated by the study of lymphocytes in the human blood stream; for a particle near the surface of a lymphocyte, how long will it take for the particle to be captured? We model this problem as a diffusive process with a mixture of reflecting and absorbing boundary conditions. The model is analyzed from two approaches. …

Daily Traffic Flow Pattern Recognition By Spectral Clustering, Matthew Aven

CMC Senior Theses

This paper explores the potential applications of existing spectral clustering algorithms to real life problems through experiments on existing road traffic data. The analysis begins with an overview of previous unsupervised machine learning techniques and constructs an effective spectral clustering algorithm that demonstrates the analytical power of the method. The paper focuses on the spectral embedding method’s ability to project non-linearly separable, high dimensional data into a more manageable space that allows for accurate clustering. The key step in this method involves solving a normalized eigenvector problem in order to construct an optimal representation of the original data.

While this …

Paving The Randomized Gauss-Seidel, Wei Wu

Scripps Senior Theses

The Randomized Gauss-Seidel Method (RGS) is an iterative algorithm that solves overdetermined systems of linear equations Ax = b. This paper studies an update on the RGS method, the Randomized Block Gauss-Seidel Method. At each step, the algorithm greedily minimizes the objective function L(x) = kAx bk2 with respect to a subset of coordinates. This paper describes a Randomized Block Gauss-Seidel Method (RBGS) which uses a randomized control method to choose a subset at each step. This algorithm is the first block RGS method with an expected linear convergence rate which can be described by the properties of the matrix …

Pattern Recognition In High-Dimensional Data, Matthew Dannenberg

HMC Senior Theses

Vast amounts of data are produced all the time. Yet this data does not easily equate to useful information: extracting information from large amounts of high dimensional data is nontrivial. People are simply drowning in data. A recent and growing source of high-dimensional data is hyperspectral imaging. Hyperspectral images allow for massive amounts of spectral information to be contained in a single image. In this thesis, a robust supervised machine learning algorithm is developed to efficiently perform binary object classification on hyperspectral image data by making use of the geometry of Grassmann manifolds. This algorithm can consistently distinguish between a …

Topic Analysis Of Tweets On The European Refugee Crisis Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Chong Shen

CMC Senior Theses

The ongoing European Refugee Crisis has been one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter for the past 8 months. This paper applies topic modeling on bulks of tweets to discover the hidden patterns within these social media discussions. In particular, we perform topic analysis through solving Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) as an Inexact Alternating Least Squares problem. We accelerate the computation using techniques including tweet sampling and augmented NMF, compare NMF results with different ranks and visualize the outputs through topic representation and frequency plots. We observe that supportive sentiments maintained a strong presence while negative sentiments such …

One-Bit Compressive Sensing With Partial Support Information, Phillip North

CMC Senior Theses

This work develops novel algorithms for incorporating prior-support information into the field of One-Bit Compressed Sensing. Traditionally, Compressed Sensing is used for acquiring high-dimensional signals from few linear measurements. In applications, it is often the case that we have some knowledge of the structure of our signal(s) beforehand, and thus we would like to leverage it to attain more accurate and efficient recovery. Additionally, the Compressive Sensing framework maintains relevance even when the available measurements are subject to extreme quantization. Indeed, the field of One-Bit Compressive Sensing aims to recover a signal from measurements reduced to only their sign-bit. This …

A Comparison Of Clustering And Missing Data Methods For Health Sciences, Ran Zhao, Deanna Needell, Christopher Johansen, Jerry L. Grenard

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In this paper, we compare and analyze clustering methods with missing data in health behavior research. In particular, we propose and analyze the use of compressive sensing's matrix completion along with spectral clustering to cluster health related data. The empirical tests and real data results show that these methods can outperform standard methods like LPA and FIML, in terms of lower misclassification rates in clustering and better matrix completion performance in missing data problems. According to our examination, a possible explanation of these improvements is that spectral clustering takes advantage of high data dimension and compressive sensing methods utilize the …

An Introduction To Fourier Analysis With Applications To Music, Nathan Lenssen, Deanna Needell

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In our modern world, we are often faced with problems in which a traditionally analog signal is discretized to enable computer analysis. A fundamental tool used by mathematicians, engineers, and scientists in this context is the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), which allows us to analyze individual frequency components of digital signals. In this paper we develop the discrete Fourier transform from basic calculus, providing the reader with the setup to understand how the DFT can be used to analyze a musical signal for chord structure. By investigating the DFT alongside an application in music processing, we gain an appreciation for …

Energy-Driven Pattern Formation In Planar Dipole-Dipole Systems, Jaron P. Kent-Dobias

HMC Senior Theses

A variety of two-dimensional fluid systems, known as dipole-mediated systems, exhibit a dipole-dipole interaction between their fluid constituents. The com- petition of this repulsive dipolar force with the cohesive fluid forces cause these systems to form intricate and patterned structures in their boundaries. In this thesis, we show that the microscopic details of any such system are irrelevant in the macroscopic limit and contribute only to a constant offset in the system’s energy. A numeric model is developed, and some important stable domain morphologies are characterized. Previously unresolved bifurcating branches are explored. Finally, by applying a random energy background to …

Propeller, Joel Kahn

The STEAM Journal

This image is based on several different algorithms interconnected within a single program in the language BASIC-256. The fundamental structure involves a tightly wound spiral working outwards from the center of the image. As the spiral is drawn, different values of red, green and blue are modified through separate but related processes, producing the changing appearance. Algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and analytic geometry are all utilized in overlapping ways within the program. As with many works of algorithmic art, small changes in the program can produce dramatic alterations of the visual output, which makes lots of variations possible.

Sloane’S Gap: Do Mathematical And Social Factors Explain The Distribution Of Numbers In The Oeis?, Nicolas J.-P. Gauvrit, Jean-Paul Delahaye, Hector Zenil

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) is a catalog of integer sequences. We are particularly interested in the number of occurrences of N(n) of an integer n in the database. This number N(n) marks the importance of n and it varies noticeably from one number to another, and from one number to the next in a series. “Importance” can be mathematically objective (2^10 is an example of an “important” number in this sense) or as the result of a shared mathematical culture (10^9 is more important than 9^10 because we use a decimal notation). The concept of algorithmic complexity …

Near-Optimal Compressed Sensing Guarantees For Anisotropic And Isotropic Total Variation Minimization, Deanna Needell, Rachel Ward

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Consider the problem of reconstructing a multidimensional signal from partial information, as in the setting of compressed sensing. Without any additional assumptions, this problem is ill-posed. However, for signals such as natural images or movies, the minimal total variation estimate consistent with the measurements often produces a good approximation to the underlying signal, even if the number of measurements is far smaller than the ambient dimensionality. Recently, guarantees for two-dimensional images were established. This paper extends these theoretical results to signals of arbitrary dimension and to both the anisotropic and isotropic total variation problems. To be precise, we show that …

Simulations Of Surfactant Driven Thin Film Flow, Shreyas Kumar

HMC Senior Theses

This thesis is intended to fulfill the requirements of the Math and Physics departments at Harvey Mudd College. We begin with a brief introduction to the study of surfactant dynamics followed by some background on the experimental framework our work is related to. We then go through a derivation of the model we use, and explore in depth the nature of the Equation of State (EoS), the relationship between the surface tension on a fluid and the surfactant concentration. We consider the effect of using an empirical equation of state on the results of the simulations and compare the new …

Sampling From The Hardcore Process, William C. Dodds

CMC Senior Theses

Partially Recursive Acceptance Rejection (PRAR) and bounding chains used in conjunction with coupling from the past (CFTP) are two perfect simulation protocols which can be used to sample from a variety of unnormalized target distributions. This paper first examines and then implements these two protocols to sample from the hardcore gas process. We empirically determine the subset of the hardcore process's parameters for which these two algorithms run in polynomial time. Comparing the efficiency of these two algorithms, we find that PRAR runs much faster for small values of the hardcore process's parameter whereas the bounding chain approach is vastly …

Noisy Signal Recovery Via Iterative Reweighted L1-Minimization, Deanna Needell

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Compressed sensing has shown that it is possible to reconstruct sparse high dimensional signals from few linear measurements. In many cases, the solution can be obtained by solving an L1-minimization problem, and this method is accurate even in the presence of noise. Recent a modified version of this method, reweighted L1-minimization, has been suggested. Although no provable results have yet been attained, empirical studies have suggested the reweighted version outperforms the standard method. Here we analyze the reweighted L1-minimization method in the noisy case, and provide provable results showing an improvement in the error bound over the standard bounds.