Categorical Data Analysis Commons^™

Access To Higher Education: Do Schools “Grant” Success?, Nathaniel Jones

Symposium of Student Scholars

University education can lead to upward income mobility for low-income students. Being exposed to other student’s life experiences that are different from their own may highlight activities and actions that they may want to consider aiding their success. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median weekly earnings in 2019 for all workers in the U.S. was $969. Of those, U.S. workers who held bachelor’s degrees earned $1,248. In 2016, the Brookings Institute found that Pell Grant recipients and first-generation student loan borrowers attended universities that had lower graduation rates and higher loan default rates in comparison to …

Use Of Linear Discriminant Analysis In Song Classification: Modeling Based On Wilco Albums, Caroline Pollard

Honors Theses

The study of music recommender algorithms is a relatively new area of study. Although these algorithms serve a variety of functions, they primarily help advertise and suggest music to users on music streaming services. This thesis explores the use of linear discriminant analysis in music categorization for the purpose of serving as a cheaper and simpler content-based recommender algorithm. The use of linear discriminant analysis was tested by creating lineardiscriminant functions that classify Wilco’s songs into their respective albums, specifically A.M., Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Sky Blue Sky. 4 sample songs were chosen from each album, and song data was …

A Comparison Of The Localized Aviation Mos Program (Lamp) And Terminal Aerodrome Forecast (Taf) Accuracy For General Aviation, Douglas D. Boyd, Thomas A. Guinn

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

Background. For general aviation (GA) pilots, operations in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) carry an elevated risk of a fatal accident. As to whether a general aviation flight can be safely undertaken, aerodrome-specific forecasts (TAF, LAMP) provide guidance. Although LAMP forecasts are more common for GA-frequented aerodromes, nevertheless, the FAA recommends that for such aerodromes (and for which a TAF is not issued) the airman uses the TAF generated for the geographically closest airport for pre-flight weather evaluation. Herein, for non-TAF-issuing airports, the LAMP (sLAMP) predictive accuracy for visual (VFR) and instrument (IFR) flight rules flight category was determined.

Method. sLAMP …

How Risk-Related Statistics, As Reported In News And Social Media, Are Linked To The Use Of The Public Transit System, Prashiddhi Pokhrel

Thinking Matters Symposium

Due to the pandemic, people have started relying more on televisions, news, social media, and other news outlets for guidance. Moreover, with the increasing amount of news, data, and information there is also an increase in the amount of misleading statistics. People’s opinions and decisions significantly depend on the data, statistics, and information that they are exposed to, as well as their sources. For this project, we want to look at how information and its sources are affecting the decision made by the general public for the usage of the Portland Transit System. It is very important to know why …

Application Of Cycle-By-Cycle Analysis To Eeg Data From Individuals With Phelan-Mcdermid Syndrome, Naomi Miller

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

This study aimed to analyze a novel method of processing data from electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, which implements time-domain cycle-by-cycle analysis. This "bycycle" method, developed by the Cole & Voytek laboratory, was implemented on a EEG dataset of children with and without Phelan-McDermid Syndrome in the hopes of uncovering network-level explanations for the genetic disorder. A supplemental Python pipeline was developed to organize and visualize the data. This led to the discovery of group-level differences in measures of cycle symmetry in alpha band waves over the sensorimotor electrodes. Through the same pipeline, the bycycle tool was validated as a sound EEG …

Node Classification On Relational Graphs Using Deep-Rgcns, Nagasai Chandra

Master's Theses

Knowledge Graphs are fascinating concepts in machine learning as they can hold usefully structured information in the form of entities and their relations. Despite the valuable applications of such graphs, most knowledge bases remain incomplete. This missing information harms downstream applications such as information retrieval and opens a window for research in statistical relational learning tasks such as node classification and link prediction. This work proposes a deep learning framework based on existing relational convolutional (R-GCN) layers to learn on highly multi-relational data characteristic of realistic knowledge graphs for node property classification tasks. We propose a deep and improved variant, …

Behavior Of Lightning In Developing Storms, Erick A. Tello

Theses and Dissertations

Air Force weather squadrons issue a warning when lightning activity is observed within 5 nautical miles (NM) of protected areas. Upon receiving this warning, personnel outdoors are expected to pause work and move inside. Studies sponsored by the 45th Weather Squadron (45 WS) have concluded that the 5 NM warning radius can be safely reduced for well-developed storms. This thesis investigates whether radii for storms in early development can also be reduced. Our research develops algorithms to partition lightning sensor data into storms. Next, storms are filtered to their earliest lightning events, and the study calculates distances between successive early …

Analyzing Student Experience On Group Work With The Application Of Different Group Allocation Approaches, An Yee Tan

Management and HR

Working as a group can be as challenging as working by oneself. Common issues like ineffective group work, unequal work contribution, and poor communication are believed to be the reasons why many students preferred to work individually. The purpose of this study is to understand if there is a disparity in student experience on group work by implementing different methods of group formation, which are, intentional group formation and random assignment. Topics around team well-being, team communication, and team effectiveness are the main focus of this study. The second emphasis of this study is students’ opinions on whether or not …

Carbon Dioxide And Particulate Matter Concentration On Hampton Roads Air Quality, Gregory Hubbard

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Hampton Roads has been a maritime crossroads for the last 400 years. Industrialization has impacted the coastal region for the last 250 years. The expansion of the Port of Virginia in 2019 has created dense traffic in the region resulting in impacts to air quality. Two waste products that affect humans are particulate matter and carbon dioxide. Both respective emissions can cause adverse effects on humans, such as asthma, some lung cancers, and other respiratory distress. Scientists and health practitioners are studying the effects of particulate matter on human health. Hampton Roads, in particular, because of its unique location on …

Maternal Proximity To Mountaintop Removal Mining And Birth Defects In Appalachian Kentucky, 1997-2003, Daniel B. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.)

Background: Extraction of coal through mountaintop removal mining (MTR) alters many dimensions of the landscape, and explosive blasts, exposed rock, and coal washing have the potential to pollute air and water with substances known to increase risk of developmental and birth anomalies. Previous research suggests that infants born to mothers living in MTR coal mining counties have higher prevalence of most types of birth defects.

Objectives: This study seeks to examine further the relationship between MTR activity and birth defects by employing individual level exposure estimation through precise satellite data of MTR activity in the Appalachian region and maternal residence …

Statistical Approaches For Estimation And Comparison Of Brain Functional Connectivity, Jifang Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Drug addiction can lead to many health-related problems and social concerns. Functional connectivity obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data promotes a variety of fundamental understandings in such association. Due to its complex correlation structure and large dimensionality, the modeling and analysis of the functional connectivity from neuroimage are challenging. By proposing a spatio-temporal model for multi-subject neuroimage data, we incorporate voxel-level spatio-temporal dependencies of whole-brain measurements to improve the accuracy of statistical inference. To tackle large-scale spatio-temporal neuroimage data, we develop a computationally efficient algorithm to estimate the parameters. Our method is used to identify functional connectivity and …

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 …

Novel Nonparametric Testing Approaches For Multivariate Growth Curve Data: Finite-Sample, Resampling And Rank-Based Methods, Ting Zeng

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

Multivariate growth curve data naturally arise in various fields, for example, biomedical science, public health, agriculture, social science and so on. For data of this type, the classical approach is to conduct multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) based on Wilks' Lambda and other multivariate statistics, which require the assumptions of multivariate normality and homogeneity of within-cell covariance matrices. However, data being analyzed nowadays show marked departure from multivariate normal distribution and homoscedasticity. In this dissertation, we investigate nonparametric testing approaches for multivariate growth curve data from three aspects, i.e., finite-sample, resampling and rank-based methods.

The first project proposes an approximate …

An Evaluation Of The Performance Of Proc Arima's Identify Statement: A Data-Driven Approach Using Covid-19 Cases And Deaths In Florida, Fahmida Akter Shahela

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Understanding data on novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and modeling such data over time are crucial for decision making at managing, fighting, and controlling the spread of this emerging disease. This thesis work looks at some aspects of exploratory analysis and modeling of COVID-19 data obtained from the Florida Department of Health (FDOH). In particular, the present work is devoted to data collection, preparation, description, and modeling of COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by FDOH between March 12, 2020, and April 30, 2021. For modeling data on both cases and deaths, this thesis utilized an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) times …

Adaptive Ensemble Of Classifiers With Regularization For Imbalanced Data Classification, Chen Wang, Chengyuan Deng, Zhoulu Yu, Dafeng Hui, Xiaofeng Gong, Ruisen Luo

Biology Faculty Research

The dynamic ensemble selection of classifiers is an effective approach for processing label-imbalanced data classifications. However, such a technique is prone to overfitting, owing to the lack of regularization methods and the dependence on local geometry of data. In this study, focusing on binary imbalanced data classification, a novel dynamic ensemble method, namely adaptive ensemble of classifiers with regularization (AER), is proposed, to overcome the stated limitations. The method solves the overfitting problem through a new perspective of implicit regularization. Specifically, it leverages the properties of stochastic gradient descent to obtain the solution with the minimum norm, thereby achieving regularization; …

Can Statcast Variables Explain The Variation In Weighted Runs Created Plus?, Ryan Kupiec

Student Research

The release of Statcast data in 2015 was revolutionary for data analysis in the game of baseball. Many analysts have begun using this data regularly, but none have used it exclusively. Often older, less reliable statistics (on-base percentage) are still used in favor of the newer statistics (weighted runs created plus). In this paper, we attempt to explain the variation in weighted runs created plus (wRC+) using Statcast variables such as exit velocity and launch angle. We find that exit velocity along with other Statcast variables, can explain as much as 70% of the variation in wRC+. Launch angle can …

Developing A Tourism Opportunity Index Regarding The Prospective Of Overtourism In Nepal, Susan Phuyal

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This research explores Nepal's overtourism scenario based on the capacity of a locality to manage sustainable tourism practices. Environmental degradation, local infrastructure degradation, negative tourist experience and local resident responses regarding visitors are the four main variables used in this study to analyze overtourism. In order to analyze the case study of overtourism, we select the three top touristic cities of Nepal, Kathmandu, Pokhara, and Chitwan based on the number of annual visitors. Nepal's case analysis of overtourism conditions reviews the overall threat of over-tourism and establishes a metric by which tourism can be viewed as potentially detrimental to sustainability. …

Direct Questioning Of Sensitive Topics In Public Health Studies: A Simulation Study, Jessica K. Fox, Evrim Oral

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Predicting Postoperative Delirium Risk For Intracranial Surgery: A Statistical Machine Learning Approach, Juliet Aygun, Alaina Bartfeld, Sahana Rayan

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Evaluation Of China Shipping Hub-And-Spoke Network Based On Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (Hhi), Wenjin Sun

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

“Playing The Whole Game”: A Data Collection And Analysis Exercise With Google Calendar, Albert Y. Kim, Johanna Hardin

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

We provide a computational exercise suitable for early introduction in an undergraduate statistics or data science course that allows students to “play the whole game” of data science: performing both data collection and data analysis. While many teaching resources exist for data analysis, such resources are not as abundant for data collection given the inherent difficulty of the task. Our proposed exercise centers around student use of Google Calendar to collect data with the goal of answering the question “How do I spend my time?” On the one hand, the exercise involves answering a question with near universal appeal, but …

Analyzing The Fractal Dimension Of Various Musical Pieces, Nathan Clark

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

One of the most common tools for evaluating data is regression. This technique, widely used by industrial engineers, explores linear relationships between predictors and the response. Each observation of the response is a fixed linear combination of the predictors with an added error element. The method is built on the assumption that this error is normally distributed across all observations and has a mean of zero. In some cases, it has been found that the inherent variation is not the result of a random variable, but is instead the result of self-symmetric properties of the observations. For data with these …

Integrating Data Science Ethics Into An Undergraduate Major, Benjamin Baumer, Randi L. Garcia, Albert Y. Kim, Katherine M. Kinnaird, Miles Q. Ott

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

We present a programmatic approach to incorporating ethics into an undergraduate major in statistical and data sciences. We discuss departmental-level initiatives designed to meet the National Academy of Sciences recommendation for weaving ethics into the curriculum from top-to-bottom as our majors progress from our introductory courses to our senior capstone course, as well as from side-to-side through co-curricular programming. We also provide six examples of data science ethics modules used in five different courses at our liberal arts college, each focusing on a different ethical consideration. The modules are designed to be portable such that they can be flexibly incorporated …

Improving The Quality And Design Of Retrospective Clinical Outcome Studies That Utilize Electronic Health Records, Oliwier Dziadkowiec, Jeffery Durbin, Vignesh Jayaraman Muralidharan, Megan Novak, Brendon Cornett

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

Electronic health records (EHRs) are an excellent source for secondary data analysis. Studies based on EHR-derived data, if designed properly, can answer previously unanswerable clinical research questions. In this paper we will highlight the benefits of large retrospective studies from secondary sources such as EHRs, examine retrospective cohort and case-control study design challenges, as well as methodological and statistical adjustment that can be made to overcome some of the inherent design limitations, in order to increase the generalizability, validity and reliability of the results obtained from these studies.

Learning Networks With Categorical Data Using Distance Correlation, And A Novel Graph-Based Multivariate Test, Jian Tinker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We study the use of distance correlation for statistical inference on categorical data, especially the induction of probability networks. Szekely et al. first defined distance correlation for continuous variables in [42], and Zhang translated the concept into the categorical setting in [57] by defining dCor(X,Y) for categorical variables X = (x1,...,xI) and Y = (y1,...,yJ) where P(X=xi)=[pi]i and P(Y=yi)=[pi]j with the formula [Please open the document]

Part I of the dissertation covers the background we need to understand this formula, and prepares us to analyze the properties and performance of its applications.

Part II then presents the main results of …

Next-Term Grade Prediction: A Machine Learning Approach, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Lei Wang, Nghia Truong Trong, Aldy Gunawan, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As students progress in their university programs, they have to face many course choices. It is important for them to receive guidance based on not only their interest, but also the "predicted" course performance so as to improve learning experience and optimise academic performance. In this paper, we propose the next-term grade prediction task as a useful course selection guidance. We propose a machine learning framework to predict course grades in a specific program term using the historical student-course data. In this framework, we develop the prediction model using Factorization Machine (FM) and Long Short Term Memory combined with FM …

Analysis Of Gameplay Strategies In Hearthstone: A Data Science Approach, Connor W. Watson

Theses

In recent years, games have been a popular test bed for AI research, and the presence of Collectible Card Games (CCGs) in that space is still increasing. One such CCG for both competitive/casual play and AI research is Hearthstone, a two-player adversarial game where players seeks to implement one of several gameplay strategies to defeat their opponent and decrease all of their Health points to zero. Although some open source simulators exist, some of their methodologies for simulated agents create opponents with a relatively low skill level. Using evolutionary algorithms, this thesis seeks to evolve agents with a higher skill …

Decision Tree For Predicting The Party Of Legislators, Afsana Mimi

Publications and Research

The motivation of the project is to identify the legislators who voted frequently against their party in terms of their roll call votes using Office of Clerk U.S. House of Representatives Data Sets collected in 2018 and 2019. We construct a model to predict the parties of legislators based on their votes. The method we used is Decision Tree from Data Mining. Python was used to collect raw data from internet, SAS was used to clean data, and all other calculations and graphical presentations are performed using the R software.

Novel Inference Methods For Generalized Linear Models Using Shrinkage Priors And Data Augmentation., Arinjita Bhattacharyya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Generalized linear models have broad applications in biostatistics and sociology. In a regression setup, the main target is to find a relevant set of predictors out of a large collection of covariates. Sparsity is the assumption that only a few of these covariates in a regression setup have a meaningful correlation with an outcome variate of interest. Sparsity is incorporated by regularizing the irrelevant slopes towards zero without changing the relevant predictors and keeping the resulting inferences intact. Frequentist variable selection and sparsity are addressed by popular techniques like Lasso, Elastic Net. Bayesian penalized regression can tackle the curse of …

Using Alteryx Designer In Audit, Nolan Asiala

Honors Projects

My senior project was built around data analysis and how it relates to the auditing profession. Initially, I was planning on attending a data analytics competition, but that was canceled due to the events of COVID-19. This project utilized the Alteryx Designer program to demonstrate how it can be used during an audit engagement. By creating a workflow in Alteryx Designer, a report from a client can be cleaned and reformatted into a working dataset. My project includes two Excel files, a Microsoft Word document that serves as a brief introduction to the program, and a video describing the workflow …