Statistical Models Commons^™

Context Aware Music Recommendation And Playlist Generation, Elias Mann

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

There are many reasons people listen to music, and the type of music is largely determined by what the listener may be doing while they listen. For example, one may listen to one type of music while commuting, another while exercising, and yet another while relaxing. Without access to the physiological state of the user, current music recommendation methods rely on collaborative filtering - recommending music based on what other similar users listen to - and content based filtering - recommending songs based on their similarities to songs the user already prefers. With the rise in popularity of smart devices …

Code For Care: Hypertension Prediction In Women Aged 18-39 Years, Kruti Sheth

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The longstanding prevalence of hypertension, often undiagnosed, poses significant risks of severe chronic and cardiovascular complications if left untreated. This study investigated the causes and underlying risks of hypertension in females aged between 18-39 years. The research questions were: (Q1.) What factors affect the occurrence of hypertension in females aged 18-39 years? (Q2.) What machine learning algorithms are suited for effectively predicting hypertension? (Q3.) How can SHAP values be leveraged to analyze the factors from model outputs? The findings are: (Q1.) Performing Feature selection using binary classification Logistic regression algorithm reveals an array of 30 most influential factors at an …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Decentralized Science (Desci): A New Paradigm For Diverse And Sustainable Scientific Development, Feiyue Wang, Wenwen Ding

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

The rise of artificial intelligence for science (AI4S) has made it particularly important and urgent to ensure the openness, fairness, impartiality, diversity, and sustainability of scientific systems. This is significant to the discourse power and leadership of countries in global innovation and industrial revolution, and also affects the security, stability, and sustainable development of a community with a shared future for mankind. To address these challenges, AI4S needs to adopt new scientific organizational and operational methods. Decentralized science (DeSci) has emerged to vitalize AI4S and provide strong support, effectively addressing issues such as information silos, biases, unfair distribution, and monopolies …

Optimizing Tumor Xenograft Experiments Using Bayesian Linear And Nonlinear Mixed Modelling And Reinforcement Learning, Mary Lena Bleile

Statistical Science Theses and Dissertations

Tumor xenograft experiments are a popular tool of cancer biology research. In a typical such experiment, one implants a set of animals with an aliquot of the human tumor of interest, applies various treatments of interest, and observes the subsequent response. Efficient analysis of the data from these experiments is therefore of utmost importance. This dissertation proposes three methods for optimizing cancer treatment and data analysis in the tumor xenograft context. The first of these is applicable to tumor xenograft experiments in general, and the second two seek to optimize the combination of radiotherapy with immunotherapy in the tumor xenograft …

Quantification Of Various Types Of Biases In Large Language Models, Sudhashree Sayenju

Doctor of Data Science and Analytics Dissertations

Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are included everywhere on the internet from search engines, language translations to more advanced systems like voice assistant and customer service. Since humans are always on the receiving end of NLP technologies, it is very important to analyze whether or not the Large Language Models (LLMs) in use have bias and are therefore unfair. The majority of the research in NLP bias has focused on societal stereotype biases embedded in LLMs. However, our research focuses on all types of biases, namely model class level bias, stereotype bias and domain bias present in LLMs. Model class …

Statistical Approach To Quantifying Interceptability Of Interaction Scenarios For Testing Autonomous Surface Vessels, Benjamin E. Hargis, Yiannis E. Papelis

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

This paper presents a probabilistic approach to quantifying interceptability of an interaction scenario designed to test collision avoidance of autonomous navigation algorithms. Interceptability is one of many measures to determine the complexity or difficulty of an interaction scenario. This approach uses a combined probability model of capability and intent to create a predicted position probability map for the system under test. Then, intercept-ability is quantified by determining the overlap between the system under test probability map and the intruder’s capability model. The approach is general; however, a demonstration is provided using kinematic capability models and an odometry-based intent model.

Self-Learning Algorithms For Intrusion Detection And Prevention Systems (Idps), Juan E. Nunez, Roger W. Tchegui Donfack, Rohit Rohit, Hayley Horn

SMU Data Science Review

Today, there is an increased risk to data privacy and information security due to cyberattacks that compromise data reliability and accessibility. New machine learning models are needed to detect and prevent these cyberattacks. One application of these models is cybersecurity threat detection and prevention systems that can create a baseline of a network's traffic patterns to detect anomalies without needing pre-labeled data; thus, enabling the identification of abnormal network events as threats. This research explored algorithms that can help automate anomaly detection on an enterprise network using Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity data. This study demonstrates that Neural Networks with Bayesian …

Computer Aided Diagnosis System For Breast Cancer Using Deep Learning., Asma Baccouche

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The recent rise of big data technology surrounding the electronic systems and developed toolkits gave birth to new promises for Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the continuous use of data-centric systems and machines in our lives, such as social media, surveys, emails, reports, etc., there is no doubt that data has gained the center of attention by scientists and motivated them to provide more decision-making and operational support systems across multiple domains. With the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, the use of machine learning and deep learning models have achieved remarkable advances in computer vision, ecommerce, cybersecurity, and healthcare. Particularly, numerous …

Intra-Hour Solar Forecasting Using Cloud Dynamics Features Extracted From Ground-Based Infrared Sky Images, Guillermo Terrén-Serrano

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Due to the increasing use of photovoltaic systems, power grids are vulnerable to the projection of shadows from moving clouds. An intra-hour solar forecast provides power grids with the capability of automatically controlling the dispatch of energy, reducing the additional cost for a guaranteed, reliable supply of energy (i.e., energy storage). This dissertation introduces a novel sky imager consisting of a long-wave radiometric infrared camera and a visible light camera with a fisheye lens. The imager is mounted on a solar tracker to maintain the Sun in the center of the images throughout the day, reducing the scattering effect produced …

Behavioral Predictive Analytics Towards Personalization For Self-Management – A Use Case On Linking Health-Related Social Needs, Bon Sy, Michael Wassil, Helene Connelly, Alisha Hassan

Publications and Research

The objective of this research is to investigate the feasibility of applying behavioral predictive analytics to optimize patient engagement in diabetes self-management, and to gain insights on the potential of infusing a chatbot with NLP technology for discovering health-related social needs. In the U.S., less than 25% of patients actively engage in self-health management even though self-health management has been reported to associate with improved health outcomes and reduced healthcare costs. The proposed behavioral predictive analytics relies on manifold clustering to identify subpopulations segmented by behavior readiness characteristics that exhibit non-linear properties. For each subpopulation, an individualized auto-regression model and …

Edge-Cloud Iot Data Analytics: Intelligence At The Edge With Deep Learning, Ananda Mohon M. Ghosh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rapid growth in numbers of connected devices, including sensors, mobile, wearable, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is creating an explosion of data that are moving across the network. To carry out machine learning (ML), IoT data are typically transferred to the cloud or another centralized system for storage and processing; however, this causes latencies and increases network traffic. Edge computing has the potential to remedy those issues by moving computation closer to the network edge and data sources. On the other hand, edge computing is limited in terms of computational power and thus is not well suited for …

Predictive Modeling Of Asynchronous Event Sequence Data, Jin Shang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Large volumes of temporal event data, such as online check-ins and electronic records of hospital admissions, are becoming increasingly available in a wide variety of applications including healthcare analytics, smart cities, and social network analysis. Those temporal events are often asynchronous, interdependent, and exhibiting self-exciting properties. For example, in the patient's diagnosis events, the elevated risk exists for a patient that has been recently at risk. Machine learning that leverages event sequence data can improve the prediction accuracy of future events and provide valuable services. For example, in e-commerce and network traffic diagnosis, the analysis of user activities can be …

Predicting Disease Progression Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks And Longitudinal Electronic Health Record Data, Seunghwan Kim

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are widely adopted and used throughout healthcare systems and are able to collect and store longitudinal information data that can be used to describe patient phenotypes. From the underlying data structures used in the EHR, discrete data can be extracted and analyzed to improve patient care and outcomes via tasks such as risk stratification and prospective disease management. Temporality in EHR is innately present given the nature of these data, however, and traditional classification models are limited in this context by the cross- sectional nature of training and prediction processes. Finding temporal patterns in EHR is …

Ordinal Hyperplane Loss, Bob Vanderheyden

Doctor of Data Science and Analytics Dissertations

This research presents the development of a new framework for analyzing ordered class data, commonly called “ordinal class” data. The focus of the work is the development of classifiers (predictive models) that predict classes from available data. Ratings scales, medical classification scales, socio-economic scales, meaningful groupings of continuous data, facial emotional intensity and facial age estimation are examples of ordinal data for which data scientists may be asked to develop predictive classifiers. It is possible to treat ordinal classification like any other classification problem that has more than two classes. Specifying a model with this strategy does not fully utilize …

Semi-Supervised Regression With Generative Adversarial Networks Using Minimal Labeled Data, Greg Olmschenk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work studies the generalization of semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GANs) to regression tasks. A novel feature layer contrasting optimization function, in conjunction with a feature matching optimization, allows the adversarial network to learn from unannotated data and thereby reduce the number of labels required to train a predictive network. An analysis of simulated training conditions is performed to explore the capabilities and limitations of the method. In concert with the semi-supervised regression GANs, an improved label topology and upsampling technique for multi-target regression tasks are shown to reduce data requirements. Improvements are demonstrated on a wide variety of vision …

Texture-Based Deep Neural Network For Histopathology Cancer Whole Slide Image (Wsi) Classification, Nelson Zange Tsaku

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Automatic histopathological Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis for cancer classification has been highlighted along with the advancements in microscopic imaging techniques. However, manual examination and diagnosis with WSIs is time-consuming and tiresome. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have succeeded in histopathological image analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cancer texture-based deep neural network (CAT-Net) that learns scalable texture features from histopathological WSIs. The innovation of CAT-Net is twofold: (1) capturing invariant spatial patterns by dilated convolutional layers and (2) Reducing model complexity while improving performance. Moreover, CAT-Net can provide discriminative texture patterns formed on cancerous regions of histopathological …

Allocative Poisson Factorization For Computational Social Science, Aaron Schein

Doctoral Dissertations

Social science data often comes in the form of high-dimensional discrete data such as categorical survey responses, social interaction records, or text. These data sets exhibit high degrees of sparsity, missingness, overdispersion, and burstiness, all of which present challenges to traditional statistical modeling techniques. The framework of Poisson factorization (PF) has emerged in recent years as a natural way to model high-dimensional discrete data sets. This framework assumes that each observed count in a data set is a Poisson random variable $y ~ Pois(\mu)$ whose rate parameter $\mu$ is a function of shared model parameters. This thesis examines a specific …

Detection Of Sand Boils From Images Using Machine Learning Approaches, Aditi S. Kuchi

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Levees provide protection for vast amounts of commercial and residential properties. However, these structures degrade over time, due to the impact of severe weather, sand boils, subsidence of land, seepage, etc. In this research, we focus on detecting sand boils. Sand boils occur when water under pressure wells up to the surface through a bed of sand. These make levees especially vulnerable. Object detection is a good approach to confirm the presence of sand boils from satellite or drone imagery, which can be utilized to assist in the automated levee monitoring methodology. Since sand boils have distinct features, applying object …

Self-Driving Cars: Evaluation Of Deep Learning Techniques For Object Detection In Different Driving Conditions, Ramesh Simhambhatla, Kevin Okiah, Shravan Kuchkula, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

Deep Learning has revolutionized Computer Vision, and it is the core technology behind capabilities of a self-driving car. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are at the heart of this deep learning revolution for improving the task of object detection. A number of successful object detection systems have been proposed in recent years that are based on CNNs. In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three recent meta-architectures: SSD (Single Shot multi-box Detector), R-CNN (Region-based CNN) and R-FCN (Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks) was conducted to measure how fast and accurate they are in identifying objects on the road, such as vehicles, pedestrians, …

Leveraging Natural Language Processing Applications And Microblogging Platform For Increased Transparency In Crisis Areas, Ernesto Carrera-Ruvalcaba, Johnson Ekedum, Austin Hancock, Ben Brock

SMU Data Science Review

Through microblogging applications, such as Twitter, people actively document their lives even in times of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. While first responders and crisis-teams are able to help people who call 911, or arrive at a designated shelter, there are vast amounts of information being exchanged online via Twitter that provide real-time, location-based alerts that are going unnoticed. To effectively use this information, the Tweets must be verified for authenticity and categorized to ensure that the proper authorities can be alerted. In this paper, we create a Crisis Message Corpus from geotagged Tweets occurring during 7 hurricanes …

Deep Neural Network Architectures For Music Genre Classification, Kai Middlebrook, Shyam Sudhakaran, Kunal Sonar, David Guy Brizan

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

With the recent advancements in technology, many tasks in fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and signal processing have been solved using deep learning architectures. In the audio domain, these architectures have been used to learn musical features of songs to predict: moods, genres, and instruments. In the case of genre classification, deep learning models were applied to popular datasets--which are explicitly chosen to represent their genres--and achieved state-of-the-art results. However, these results have not been reproduced on less refined datasets. To this end, we introduce an un-curated dataset which contains genre labels and 30-second audio previews for …

A Data-Driven Approach For Modeling Agents, Hamdi Kavak

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Agents are commonly created on a set of simple rules driven by theories, hypotheses, and assumptions. Such modeling premise has limited use of real-world data and is challenged when modeling real-world systems due to the lack of empirical grounding. Simultaneously, the last decade has witnessed the production and availability of large-scale data from various sensors that carry behavioral signals. These data sources have the potential to change the way we create agent-based models; from simple rules to driven by data. Despite this opportunity, the literature has neglected to offer a modeling approach to generate granular agent behaviors from data, creating …

Context-Aware Personalized Point-Of-Interest Recommendation System, Ramesh Raj Baral

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increasing volume of information has created overwhelming challenges to extract the relevant items manually. Fortunately, the online systems, such as e-commerce (e.g., Amazon), location-based social networks (LBSNs) (e.g., Facebook) among many others have the ability to track end users' browsing and consumption experiences. Such explicit experiences (e.g., ratings) and many implicit contexts (e.g., social, spatial, temporal, and categorical) are useful in preference elicitation and recommendation. As an emerging branch of information filtering, the recommendation systems are already popular in many domains, such as movies (e.g., YouTube), music (e.g., Pandora), and Point-of-Interest (POI) (e.g., Yelp).

The POI domain has many …

Improving Vix Futures Forecasts Using Machine Learning Methods, James Hosker, Slobodan Djurdjevic, Hieu Nguyen, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

The problem of forecasting market volatility is a difficult task for most fund managers. Volatility forecasts are used for risk management, alpha (risk) trading, and the reduction of trading friction. Improving the forecasts of future market volatility assists fund managers in adding or reducing risk in their portfolios as well as in increasing hedges to protect their portfolios in anticipation of a market sell-off event. Our analysis compares three existing financial models that forecast future market volatility using the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) to six machine/deep learning supervised regression methods. This analysis determines which models provide best …

Data Patterns Discovery Using Unsupervised Learning, Rachel A. Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Self-care activities classification poses significant challenges in identifying children’s unique functional abilities and needs within the exceptional children healthcare system. The accuracy of diagnosing a child's self-care problem, such as toileting or dressing, is highly influenced by an occupational therapists’ experience and time constraints. Thus, there is a need for objective means to detect and predict in advance the self-care problems of children with physical and motor disabilities. We use clustering to discover interesting information from self-care problems, perform automatic classification of binary data, and discover outliers. The advantages are twofold: the advancement of knowledge on identifying self-care problems in …

Quantifying Human Biological Age: A Machine Learning Approach, Syed Ashiqur Rahman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Quantifying human biological age is an important and difficult challenge. Different biomarkers and numerous approaches have been studied for biological age prediction, each with its advantages and limitations. In this work, we first introduce a new anthropometric measure (called Surface-based Body Shape Index, SBSI) that accounts for both body shape and body size, and evaluate its performance as a predictor of all-cause mortality. We analyzed data from the National Health and Human Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Based on the analysis, we introduce a new body shape index constructed from four important anthropometric determinants of body shape and body size: body …

Deep Machine Learning For Mechanical Performance And Failure Prediction, Elijah Reber, Nickolas D. Winovich, Guang Lin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Deep learning has provided opportunities for advancement in many fields. One such opportunity is being able to accurately predict real world events. Ensuring proper motor function and being able to predict energy output is a valuable asset for owners of wind turbines. In this paper, we look at how effective a deep neural network is at predicting the failure or energy output of a wind turbine. A data set was obtained that contained sensor data from 17 wind turbines over 13 months, measuring numerous variables, such as spindle speed and blade position and whether or not the wind turbine experienced …

Cognitive Virtual Admissions Counselor, Kumar Raja Guvindan Raju, Cory Adams, Raghuram Srinivas

SMU Data Science Review

Abstract. In this paper, we present a cognitive virtual admissions counselor for the Master of Science in Data Science program at Southern Methodist University. The virtual admissions counselor is a system capable of providing potential students accurate information at the time that they want to know it. After the evaluation of multiple technologies, Amazon’s LEX was selected to serve as the core technology for the virtual counselor chatbot. Student surveys were leveraged to collect and generate training data to deploy the natural language capability. The cognitive virtual admissions counselor platform is currently capable of providing an end-to-end conversational dialog to …

Wildfire Emissions In The Context Of Global Change And The Implications For Mercury Pollution, Aditya Kumar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Wildfires are episodic disturbances that exert a significant influence on the Earth system. They emit substantial amounts of atmospheric pollutants, which can impact atmospheric chemistry/composition and the Earth’s climate at the global and regional scales. This work presents a collection of studies aimed at better estimating wildfire emissions of atmospheric pollutants, quantifying their impacts on remote ecosystems and determining the implications of 2000s-2050s global environmental change (land use/land cover, climate) for wildfire emissions following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) A1B socioeconomic scenario.

A global fire emissions model is developed to compile global wildfire emission inventories for major atmospheric …