Categorical Data Analysis Commons^™

Market Research On Student Concert Attendance At Bgsu's College Of Musical Arts, Mary Solomon

Honors Projects

Bowling Green State University boasts a well established College of Musical Arts which holds concerts performed by esteemed faculty, prestigious guest artists, and students. The school hosts these events in Kobacker Hall and Bryan Recital Hall which can accommodate up to 800 and 250 audience members, respectively. However, performances in Kobacker hall only fill one- fourth of the 800 seats, on average. Why is this so? This project aims to investigate the factors that influence students’ decisions to attend concerts at the College of Musical Arts (CMA). By methodology of survey research and statistical analysis, this project will look into …

Black Swamp Pub And Bistro Analysis, Sara Aniol

Honors Projects

The Black Swamp Pub and Bistro is a full-service restaurant located in the Union on the Bowling Green State University Campus. We mainly do sit-down service, but we also do take-out orders and have a full bar with draft beers as well as mixed drinks. Our menu tends to change a lot, with new additions as well as some of the items being deleted. My goal of this project is to try to give some insight on the patterns that are too big to see with day-to-day operations as well as give some recommendations for the future that is backed …

Fixed Choice Design And Augmented Fixed Choice Design For Network Data With Missing Observations, Miles Q. Ott, Matthew T. Harrison, Krista J. Gile, Nancy P. Barnett, Joseph W. Hogan

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

The statistical analysis of social networks is increasingly used to understand social processes and patterns. The association between social relationships and individual behaviors is of particular interest to sociologists, psychologists, and public health researchers. Several recent network studies make use of the fixed choice design (FCD), which induces missing edges in the network data. Because of the complex dependence structure inherent in networks, missing data can pose very difficult problems for valid statistical inference. In this article, we introduce novel methods for accounting for the FCD censoring and introduce a new survey design, which we call the augmented fixed choice …

Modeling Stochastically Intransitive Relationships In Paired Comparison Data, Ryan Patrick Alexander Mcshane

Statistical Science Theses and Dissertations

If the Warriors beat the Rockets and the Rockets beat the Spurs, does that mean that the Warriors are better than the Spurs? Sophisticated fans would argue that the Warriors are better by the transitive property, but could Spurs fans make a legitimate argument that their team is better despite this chain of evidence?

We first explore the nature of intransitive (rock-scissors-paper) relationships with a graph theoretic approach to the method of paired comparisons framework popularized by Kendall and Smith (1940). Then, we focus on the setting where all pairs of items, teams, players, or objects have been compared to …

Improving Access To Clean Water In Rural Ecuador: The Connection Between Willingness To Pay And Population Health, Micalea Leaska

Capstone Collection

Climate change is affecting social and environmental determinants of health through access to safe drinking water, safely managed sanitation systems, and access to health care services and the ability for individuals to break free from unsuitable circumstances. Ecological disturbances such as those caused by climate change can cause a shift in host vectors or a change in habitat that results in a greater likelihood of the pathogen coming in contact with humans. Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services and their accessibility to populations can directly impact a community’s vulnerability to diseases and limiting factors to increase economic growth. If rural …

U.S. College Students’ Social Network Characteristics And Perceived Social Exclusion: A Comparison Between Drinkers And Nondrinkers Based On Pastmonth Alcohol Use, Sara G. Balestrieri, Graham T. Diguiseppi, Matthew Meisel, Melissa A. Clark, Miles Q. Ott, Nancy P. Barnett

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

There is a general perception on college campuses that alcohol use is normative. However, nondrinking students account for 40% of the U.S. college population. With much of the literature focusing on intervening among drinkers, there has been less of a focus on understanding the nondrinker college experience. The current study has two aims: to describe the social network differences between nondrinkers and drinkers in a college setting, and to assess perceived social exclusion among nondrinkers. METHOD:First-year U.S. college students (n = 1,342; 55.3% female; 47.7% non-Hispanic White) were participants in a larger study examining a social network of one college …

Resistance To Peer Influence Moderates The Relationship Between Perceived (But Not Actual) Peer Norms And Binge Drinking In A College Student Social Network, Graham T. Diguiseppi, Matthew K. Meisel, Sara G. Balestrieri, Miles Q. Ott, Melissa J. Cox, Melissa A. Clark, Nancy P. Barnett

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Introduction: Adolescent and young adult binge drinking is strongly associated with perceived social norms and the drinking behavior that occurs within peer networks. The extent to which an individual is influenced by the behavior of others may depend upon that individual’s resistance to peer influence (RPI).

Methods: Students in their first semester of college (N = 1323; 54.7% female, 57% White, 15.1% Hispanic) reported on their own binge drinking, and the perceived binge drinking of up to 10 important peers in the first-year class. Using network autocorrelation models, we investigated cross-sectional relationships between participant’s binge drinking frequency and the perceived …

Under The Influence, Leonardo Cavicchio

Honors Projects in Mathematics

The purpose of this Honors Capstone entitled Under the Influence is to assess the validity of claims concerning the possible influence of roommates on one another, concerning alcohol on college campuses. This will be done by examining data collected in a prior study conducted over a two-year period. This analysis will focus on how alcohol consumption changes in correlation with the personality factors of roommates over an extended period of time. This secondary analysis of de-identified data will focus on primary and secondary subquestions. The primary question that will be addressed with the data set collected from the University of …

Understanding Natural Keyboard Typing Using Convolutional Neural Networks On Mobile Sensor Data, Travis Siems

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Mobile phones and other devices with embedded sensors are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Audio and motion sensor data may be able to detect information that we did not think possible. Some researchers have created models that can predict computer keyboard typing from a nearby mobile device; however, certain limitations to their experiment setup and methods compelled us to be skeptical of the models’ realistic prediction capability. We investigate the possibility of understanding natural keyboard typing from mobile phones by performing a well-designed data collection experiment that encourages natural typing and interactions. This data collection helps capture realistic vulnerabilities of the security …

An Event- And Network-Level Analysis Of College Students’ Maximum Drinking Day, Matthew K. Meisel, Angelo M. Dibello, Sara G. Balestrieri, Miles Q. Ott, Graham T. Diguiseppi, Melissa A. Clark, Nancy P. Barnett

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Background—Heavy episodic drinking is common among college students and remains a serious public health issue. Previous event-level research among college students has examined behaviors and individual-level characteristics that drive consumption and related consequences but often ignores the social network of people with whom these heavy drinking episodes occur. The main aim of the current study was to investigate the network of social connections between drinkers on their heaviest drinking occasions.

Methods—Sociocentric network methods were used to collect information from individuals in the first-year class (N=1342) at one university. Past-month drinkers (N=972) reported on the characteristics of their heaviest drinking occasion …

Building A Better Risk Prevention Model, Steven Hornyak

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

This presentation chronicles the work of Houston County Schools in developing a risk prevention model built on more than ten years of longitudinal student data. In its second year of implementation, Houston At-Risk Profiles (HARP), has proven effective in identifying those students most in need of support and linking them to interventions and supports that lead to improved outcomes and significantly reduces the risk of failure.

Improving The Accuracy For The Long-Term Hydrologic Impact Assessment (L-Thia) Model, Anqi Zhang, Lawrence Theller, Bernard A. Engel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Urbanization increases runoff by changing land use types from less impervious to impervious covers. Improving the accuracy of a runoff assessment model, the Long-Term Hydrologic Impact Assessment (L-THIA) Model, can help us to better evaluate the potential uses of Low Impact Development (LID) practices aimed at reducing runoff, as well as to identify appropriate runoff and water quality mitigation methods. Several versions of the model have been built over time, and inconsistencies have been introduced between the models. To improve the accuracy and consistency of the model, the equations and parameters (primarily curve numbers in the case of this model) …

On The Three Dimensional Interaction Between Flexible Fibers And Fluid Flow, Bogdan Nita, Ryan Allaire

Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper we discuss the deformation of a flexible fiber clamped to a spherical body and immersed in a flow of fluid moving with a speed ranging between 0 and 50 cm/s by means of three dimensional numerical simulation developed in COMSOL . The effects of flow speed and initial configuration angle of the fiber relative to the flow are analyzed. A rigorous analysis of the numerical procedure is performed and our code is benchmarked against well established cases. The flow velocity and pressure are used to compute drag forces upon the fiber. Of particular interest is the behavior …

Advance Care Planning As A Shared Endeavor: Completion Of Acp Documents In A Multidisciplinary Cancer Program, Melissa A. Clark, Miles Q. Ott, Michelle L. Rogers, Mary C. Politi, Susan C. Miller, Laura Moynihan, Katina Robison, Ashley Stuckey, Don Dizon

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Objective—We examined the roles of oncology providers in advance care planning (ACP) delivery in the context of a multidisciplinary cancer program.

Methods—Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 200 women with recurrent and/or metastatic breast or gynecologic cancer. Participants were asked to name providers they deemed important in their cancer care and whether they had discussed and/or completed ACP documentation. Evidence of ACP documentation was obtained from chart reviews.

Results—Fifty percent of participants self-reported completing an advance directive (AD) and 48.5% had named a healthcare power of attorney (HPA), 38.5% had completed both, and 39.0% had completed neither document. Among women who …

Alcohol Perceptions And Behavior In A Residential Peer Social Network, Shannon R. Kenney, Miles Q. Ott, Matthew Meisel, Nancy P. Barnett

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Personalized normative feedback is a recommended component of alcohol interventions targeting college students. However, normative data are commonly collected through campus-based surveys, not through actual participant-referent relationships. In the present investigation, we examined how misperceptions of residence hall peers, both overall using a global question and those designated as important peers using person-specific questions, were related to students’ personal drinking behaviors. Participants were 108 students (88% freshman, 54% White, 51% female) residing in a single campus residence hall. Participants completed an online baseline survey in which they reported their own alcohol use and perceptions of peer alcohol use using both …

Curriculum Guidelines For Undergraduate Programs In Data Science, Richard D. De Veaux, Mahesh Agarwal, Maia Averett, Benjamin Baumer, Andrew Bray, Thomas C. Bressoud, Lance Bryant, Lei Z. Cheng, Amanda Francis, Robert Gould, Albert Y. Kim, Matt Kretchmar, Qin Lu, Ann Moskol, Deborah Nolan, Roberto Pelayo, Sean Raleigh, Ricky J. Sethi, Mutiara Sondjaja, Neelesh Tiruviluamala, Paul X. Uhlig, Talitha M. Washington, Curtis L. Wesley, David White, Ping Ye

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

The Park City Math Institute 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in data science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of institutions in the United States, primarily from the disciplines of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in data science.

A Traders Guide To The Predictive Universe- A Model For Predicting Oil Price Targets And Trading On Them, Jimmie Harold Lenz

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

At heart every trader loves volatility; this is where return on investment comes from, this is what drives the proverbial “positive alpha.” As a trader, understanding the probabilities related to the volatility of prices is key, however if you could also predict future prices with reliability the world would be your oyster. To this end, I have achieved three goals with this dissertation, to develop a model to predict future short term prices (direction and magnitude), to effectively test this by generating consistent profits utilizing a trading model developed for this purpose, and to write a paper that anyone with …

Bayesian Peer Calibration With Application To Alcohol Use, Miles Q. Ott, Joseph W. Hogan, Krista J. Gile, Crystal Linkletter, Nancy P. Barnett

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Peers are often able to provide important additional information to supplement self-reported behavioral measures. The study motivating this work collected data on alcohol in a social network formed by college students living in a freshman dormitory. By using two imperfect sources of information (self-reported and peer-reported alcohol consumption), rather than solely self-reports or peer-reports, we are able to gain insight into alcohol consumption on both the population and the individual level, as well as information on the discrepancy of individual peer-reports. We develop a novel Bayesian comparative calibration model for continuous, count and binary outcomes that uses covariate information to …

Does Academic Performance Predict Workplace Productivity?, Jodie-Gaye Hunter

Honors Projects in Economics

This research examines if college GPA affects productivity and compensation in the workplace. It uses data collected from a survey of approximately 23,000 Bryant University graduates in different stages of their career. About 10 percent of the alumni surveyed completed the survey. The econometric model used in this study allows estimating the effect of GPA on income after controlling for various demographic and socioeconomic variables, including education, major, occupation, gender, among others. The empirical work provides evidence that GPA has a positive and statistically significant impact on workplace productivity for females, but GPA seems to be a weaker predictor of …

Unequal Edge Inclusion Probabilities In Link-Tracing Network Sampling With Implications For Respondent-Driven Sampling, Miles Q. Ott, Krista J. Gile

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is a widely adopted linktracing sampling design used to draw valid statistical inference from samples of populations for which there is no available sampling frame. RDS estimators rely upon the assumption that each edge (representing a relationship between two individuals) in the underlying network has an equal probability of being sampled. We show that this assumption is violated in even the simplest cases, and that RDS estimators are sensitive to the violation of this assumption.

A Nonlinear Filter For Markov Chains And Its Effect On Diffusion Maps, Stefan Steinerberger

Yale Day of Data

Diffusion maps are a modern mathematical tool that helps to find structure in large data sets - we present a new filtering technique that is based on the assumption that errors in the data are intrinsically random to isolate and filter errors and thus boost the efficiency of diffusion maps. Applications include data sets from medicine (the Cleveland Heart Disease Data set and the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data set) and engineering (the Ionosphere data set).

Scientific Awareness At Ursinus College, Frank G. Devone

Mathematics Honors Papers

Ursinus College prides itself on creating well-rounded students, and recent initiatives, such as the Fellowships in the Ursinus Transition to the Undergraduate Research Experience Program and the Center for Science and the Common Good suggest that science is a vital part of the Ursinus liberal arts mission. A scientific awareness pilot survey was administered to a sample of Ursinus students drawn from the Class of 2014 and students residing at Ursinus during summer 2014. Experience and data collected from this pilot were used to create a final survey which was made available to all students at Ursinus College. The survey …

A Bayesian Model For Cluster Detection, Jonathan Wakefield, Albert Y. Kim

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

The detection of areas in which the risk of a particular disease is significantly elevated, leading to an excess of cases, is an important enterprise in spatial epidemiology. Various frequentist approaches have been suggested for the detection of “clusters” within a hypothesis testing framework. Unfortunately, these suffer from a number of drawbacks including the difficulty in specifying a p-value threshold at which to call significance, the inherent multiplicity problem, and the possibility of multiple clusters. In this paper, we suggest a Bayesian approach to detecting “areas of clustering” in which the study region is partitioned into, possibly multiple, “zones” …

Repeated Changes In Reported Sexual Orientation Identity Linked To Substance Use Behaviors In Youth, Miles Q. Ott, David Wypij, Heather L. Corliss, Margaret Rosario, Sari L. Reisner, Allegra R. Gordon, S. Bryn Austin

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Purpose—Previous studies have found that sexual minority (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual) adolescents are at higher risk of substance use than heterosexuals, but few have examined how changes in sexual orientation over time may relate to substance use. We examined the associations between change in sexual orientation identity and marijuana use, tobacco use, and binge drinking in U.S. youth.

Methods—Prospective data from 10,515 U.S. youth ages 12-27 years in a longitudinal cohort study were analyzed using sexual orientation identity mobility measure M (frequency of change from 0 [no change] to 1 [change at every wave]) in up to five waves of …

Interactive Concept To Aid In Understanding Dimensional Analysis, Alicia Hicks

Symposium 2012

Many students struggle with learning how to utilize dimensional analysis. This confusion is due to not understanding the concept of dose per volume, leading to difficulty when starting the sequencing. This could be one of the contributing causes to medication errors in clinical practice. Does using models, such as Play-doh and pebbles, help students learn the concept of milligrams per milliliters when calculating dosages using dimensional analysis method? A series of pre- and post-tests are used to measure learning growth in each of the treatment groups. Three treatment groups were utilized: Control: one group had no intervention between the pre …

Stability And Change In Self-Reported Sexual Orientation Identity In Young People: Application Of Mobility Metrics, Miles Q. Ott, Heather L. Corliss, David Wypij, Margaret Rosario, S. Bryn Austin

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

This study investigated stability and change in self-reported sexual orientation identity over time in youth. We describe gender- and age-related changes in sexual orientation identity from early adolescence through emerging adulthood in 13,840 youth ages 12–25 employing mobility measure M, a measure we modified from its original application for econometrics. Using prospective data from a large, ongoing cohort of U.S. adolescents, we examined mobility in sexual orientation identity in youth with up to four waves of data. Ten percent of males and 20% of females at some point described themselves as a sexual minority, while 2% of both males and …

Age-Gaps In Sexual Partnerships: Seeing Beyond ‘Sugar Daddies’, Miles Q. Ott, Till Bärnighausen, Frank Tanser, Mark N. Lurie, Marie-Louise Newell

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

We examine for the first time age-mixing in sexual relationships in a population with very high HIV incidence and prevalence in rural South Africa. The highest levels of age assortativity (the pairing of like with like) were casual partnerships reported by men, the lowest levels were spousal relationships reported by women. Given the age–sex distribution of HIV prevalence in this population, interventions to decrease age-gaps in spousal relationships may be effective in reducing HIV incidence.

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …

Using Labeled Data To Evaluate Change Detectors In A Multivariate Streaming Environment, Albert Y. Kim, Caren Marzban, Donald B. Percival, Werner Stuetzle

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

We consider the problem of detecting changes in a multivariate data stream. A change detector is defined by a detection algorithm and an alarm threshold. A detection algorithm maps the stream of input vectors into a univariate detection stream. The detector signals a change when the detection stream exceeds the chosen alarm threshold. We consider two aspects of the problem: (1) setting the alarm threshold and (2) measuring/comparing the performance of detection algorithms. We assume we are given a segment of the stream where changes of interest are marked. We present evidence that, without such marked training data, it might …

Lessons Learned From The 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic In Minneapolis And St. Paul, Minnesota, Miles Q. Ott, Shelly F. Shaw, Richard N. Danila, Ruth Lynfield

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.