Statistical Models Commons^™

Phylogeny And Disparity Of Ammonoid Family Acanthoceratidae Over Ocean Anoxic Event 2, Lindsey Howard

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The widespread use of genera as proxies for species in paleobiological studies might affect the results of these studies. Although most attention has been given to taxonomic diversity studies, this could also be true of disparity and phylogenetic studies. In particular, the assumption that particular character states truly diagnose all members of a genus might distort results. This study examines the disparity of Acanthoceratid ammonoids at both the generic and species level. 149 species from 42 genera were examined with 52 characters measured. Following the measurements, an inverse modeling simulation was run 100 times to generate a simulated phylogeny with …

Evaluation Of Regression Methods And Competition Indices In Characterizing Height-Diameter Relationships For Temperate And Pantropical Tree Species, Sakar Jha

Masters Theses

Height-diameter relationship models, denoted as H-D models, have important applications in sustainable forest management which include studying the vertical structure of a forest stand, understanding the habitat heterogeneity for wildlife niches, analyzing the growth rate pattern for making decisions regarding silvicultural treatments. Compared to monocultures, characterizing allometric relationships for uneven-aged, mixed-species forests, especially tropical forests, is more challenging and has historically received less attention. Modelling how the competitive interactions between trees of varying sizes and multiple species affects these relationships adds a high degree of complexity. In this study, five regression methods and five distance-independent competition indices were evaluated for …

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 …

Langevin Dynamic Models For Smfret Dynamic Shift, David Frost, Keisha Cook Dr, Hugo Sanabria Dr

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Modeling Biphasic, Non-Sigmoidal Dose-Response Relationships: Comparison Of Brain- Cousens And Cedergreen Models For A Biochemical Dataset, Venkat D. Abbaraju, Tamaraty L. Robinson, Brian P. Weiser

Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine Departmental Research

Biphasic, non-sigmoidal dose-response relationships are frequently observed in biochemistry and pharmacology, but they are not always analyzed with appropriate statistical methods. Here, we examine curve fitting methods for “hormetic” dose-response relationships where low and high doses of an effector produce opposite responses. We provide the full dataset used for modeling, and we provide the code for analyzing the dataset in SAS using two established mathematical models of hormesis, the Brain-Cousens model and the Cedergreen model. We show how to obtain and interpret curve parameters such as the ED50 that arise from modeling, and we discuss how curve parameters might change …

Addressing The Impact Of Time-Dependent Social Groupings On Animal Survival And Recapture Rates In Mark-Recapture Studies, Alexandru M. Draghici

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mark-recapture (MR) models typically assume that individuals under study have independent survival and recapture outcomes. One such model of interest is known as the Cormack-Jolly-Seber (CJS) model. In this dissertation, we conduct three major research projects focused on studying the impact of violating the independence assumption in MR models along with presenting extensions which relax the independence assumption. In the first project, we conduct a simulation study to address the impact of failing to account for pair-bonded animals having correlated recapture and survival fates on the CJS model. We examined the impact of correlation on the likelihood ratio test (LRT), …

Analytical Approach For Monitoring The Behavior Of Patients With Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma At Different Stages As A Function Of Time, Aditya Chakaborty Dr, Chris P. Tsokos Dr

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Predicting Dengue Incidence In Central Argentina Using Google Trends Data, Sahil Chindal, Elizabet Estallo, Yanjun Qian, Michael Robert

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Factors Affecting Apothecia Production And Primary Infection By Monilinia Vaccinii-Corymbosi On Vaccinium Angustifolium, Ian Leonard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mummy berry, caused by Monilinia vaccinii-corymbosi (MVC), is a prolific disease of Vaccinium angustifolium (wild blueberry) leading to decreased yield in wild blueberry fields throughout the Downeast (DE) and Midcoast (MC) regions of Maine (ME). This study aimed to identify factors affecting primary inoculum production and infection by MVC on wild blueberry, and what bud stages of wild blueberry are most susceptible to infection. Through common garden (CGE), field and incubation experiments conducted in 2021 and 2022, factors affecting carpogenic germination of MVC pseudosclerotia and relationships between susceptible wild blueberry buds and environmental factors were analyzed. The CGE conducted in …

Multidimensional Investigation Of Tennessee’S Urban Forest, Jillian L. Gorrell

Doctoral Dissertations

Preserving existing trees in urban areas and properly cultivating urban forest conservation and management opportunities is valuable to the ever-growing urban environment and necessary for creating optimal experiences and educational tools to meet the needs of increasing urban populations. This dissertation contains studies investigating several facets of the urban forest, including environmental effects of deforestation and urbanization, tree equity, and urban forest facility management and accessibility. Community education and outreach at arboreta about the importance of the tree canopy can help promote environmental stewardship. A digital questionnaire was electronically distributed to representatives of arboreta certified through the Tennessee Division of …

Shallow Water Coral Distribution And Its Response To Climate Change, Amaury De Jesus

Dissertations and Theses

Shallow water corals are one of the main reef-building organisms that secrete carbonates as their skeletons, and therefore, are one of the major sinks of CO2 in the ocean. These reef builders are also very crucial to marine environments and human society. As the global energy demand continues rising, fossil fuel burning increases at a faster pace despite the increase in energy supply using clean and renewable energy. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere has been shown to exacerbate global warming and may cause ocean acidification, threatening the habitat of shallow-water corals. Many recent observations show alarming signs of …

Carnivore And Ungulate Occurrence In A Fire-Prone Region, Sara J. Moriarty-Graves

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Increasing fire size and severity in the western United States causes changes to ecosystems, species’ habitat use, and interspecific interactions. Wide-ranging carnivore and ungulate mammalian species and their interactions may be influenced by an increase in fire activity in northern California. Depending on the fire characteristics, ungulates may benefit from burned habitat due to an increase in forage availability, while carnivore species may be differentially impacted, but ultimately driven by bottom-up processes from a shift in prey availability. I used a three-step approach to estimate the single-species occupancy of four large mammal species: mountain lion (Puma concolor), coyote …

Statistical Methods For Gene Selection And Genetic Association Studies, Xuewei Cao

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation includes five Chapters. A brief description of each chapter is organized as follows.

In Chapter One, we propose a signed bipartite genotype and phenotype network (GPN) by linking phenotypes and genotypes based on the statistical associations. It provides a new insight to investigate the genetic architecture among multiple correlated phenotypes and explore where phenotypes might be related at a higher level of cellular and organismal organization. We show that multiple phenotypes association studies by considering the proposed network are improved by incorporating the genetic information into the phenotype clustering.

In Chapter Two, we first illustrate the proposed GPN …

Modeling Growth And Stress Factors For Converted Silvopasture Systems In The Missouri Ozarks, Bailee N. Suedmeyer

MSU Graduate Theses

Silvopasture systems are becoming increasingly popular among sustainable agriculture ranchers, due to the increase in knowledge of benefits to the cattle and ability to grow cool season grasses beneath the canopy. This project focuses on the forest crop aspect of silvopasture systems from monitoring of the health of the trees over time to recommendations for thinning management to keep it functioning as viable silvopasture. The study site consists of five acres of upland hardwood forest area in Southern Missouri with 18 monumented fixed area plots. Arial and ground data was collected at each plot throughout the growing season, along with …

Utilizing Markov Chains To Estimate Allele Progression Through Generations, Ronit Gandhi

Honors Theses

All populations display patterns in allele frequencies over time. Some alleles cease to exist, while some grow to become the norm. These frequencies can shift or stay constant based on the conditions the population lives in. If in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the allele frequencies stay constant. Most populations, however, have bias from environmental factors, sexual preferences, other organisms, etc. We propose a stochastic Markov chain model to study allele progression across generations. In such a model, the allele frequencies in the next generation depend only on the frequencies in the current one.

We use this model to track a recessive allele …

The Birds And The Trees: Quantifying The Drivers Of Whitebark Pine Decline And Clark's Nutcracker Habitat Use In Glacier National Park, Vladimir Kovalenko

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, is in steep decline in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA due to the non-native pathogen Cronartium ribicola, causal agent of the fatal disease white pine blister rust. A sample of the park’s population suggests that approximately 70 percent of whitebark pines have died, while 65 percent of the remaining trees are infected. Using landscape and climate variables, we show how geographic location, elevation, aspect, solar radiation, relative humidity, and snowpack interact with tree diameter to affect mortality, disease incidence, cone production, and regeneration. We also examine how …

Towards Structured Planning And Learning At The State Fisheries Agency Scale, Caleb A. Aldridge

Theses and Dissertations

Inland recreational fisheries has grown philosophically and scientifically to consider economic and sociopolitical aspects (non-biological) in addition to the biological. However, integrating biological and non-biological aspects of inland fisheries has been challenging. Thus, an opportunity exists to develop approaches and tools which operationalize planning and decision-making processes which include biological and non-biological aspects of a fishery. This dissertation expands the idea that a core set of goals and objectives is shared among and within inland fisheries agencies; that many routine operations of inland fisheries managers can be regimented or standardized; and the novel concept that current information and operations can …

Larval Ecology Of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus Thynnus): New Insights From Otolith Microstructure, Biotic, And Abiotic Analyses From The Gulf Of Mexico And Mediterranean Sea, Estrella Malca

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Atlantic bluefin tuna (ABT), Thunnus thynnus, spawn in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) and the Mediterranean Sea (MED). Spawning occurs within narrow temporal and environmental parameters. Efforts to characterize growth of ABT in wild conditions revealed a wide range of growth variability during the early life stages. This series of studies examined potential biotic and abiotic influences of larval growth from seven ABT cohorts, and identified several key drivers of growth for this commercially valuable species. A detailed investigation of larval dynamics using otolith microstructure was conducted as follows. First, companion growth curves and stable isotope analysis from the same …

Bayesian Methods For Graphical Models With Neighborhood Selection., Sagnik Bhadury

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Graphical models determine associations between variables through the notion of conditional independence. Gaussian graphical models are a widely used class of such models, where the relationships are formalized by non-null entries of the precision matrix. However, in high-dimensional cases, covariance estimates are typically unstable. Moreover, it is natural to expect only a few significant associations to be present in many realistic applications. This necessitates the injection of sparsity techniques into the estimation method. Classical frequentist methods, like GLASSO, use penalization techniques for this purpose. Fully Bayesian methods, on the contrary, are slow because they require iteratively sampling over a quadratic …

Ecological Modeling In The Oceanic Zone: A Gulf Of Mexico Case Study, Matthew Woodstock

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ecological modeling is a popular tool to assess the functionality of marine ecosystems and quantify an ecosystem’s response to anthropogenic stressors (e.g., fishing, oil spills, climate change). However, much of the global modeling effort has been focused on coastal regions that are generally more data-rich than the area seaward of the continental shelf (i.e., oceanic zone). A concerted effort has been placed on collecting holistic, ecosystem-scale data in the oceanic, northeast Gulf of Mexico since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWHOS), particularly in the deep-pelagic zone (water column deeper than 200m depth), which has notably experienced declines in several …

How Environmental Change Will Impact Mosquito-Borne Diseases, Arsal Khan

Master's Projects and Capstones

Mosquitos, the most lethal species throughout human history, are the most prevalent source of vector-borne diseases and therefore a major global health burden. Mosquito-borne disease incidence is expected to shift with environmental change. These changes can be predicted using species distribution models. With the wide variety of methods used for models, consensus for improving accuracy and comparability is needed. A comparative analysis of three recent modeling approaches revealed that integrating modeling techniques compensates for trade-offs associated with a singular approach. An area that represents a critical gap in our ability to predict mosquito behavior in response to changing climate factors, …

Finding The Best Predictors For Foot Traffic In Us Seafood Restaurants, Isabel Paige Beaulieu

Honors Theses and Capstones

COVID-19 caused state and nation-wide lockdowns, which altered human foot traffic, especially in restaurants. The seafood sector in particular suffered greatly as there was an increase in illegal fishing, it is made up of perishable goods, it is seasonal in some places, and imports and exports were slowed. Foot traffic data is useful for business owners to have to know how much to order, how many employees to schedule, etc. One issue is that the data is very expensive, hard to get, and not available until months after it is recorded. Our goal is to not only find covariates that …

Identification And Characterization Of Forest Fire Risk Zones Leveraging Machine Learning Methods, Joshua Balson, Matt Chinchilla, Cam Lu, Jeff Washburn, Nibhrat Lohia

SMU Data Science Review

Across the United States, record numbers of wildfires are observed costing billions of dollars in property damage, polluting the environment, and putting lives at risk. The ability of emergency management professionals, city planners, and private entities such as insurance companies to determine if an area is at higher risk of a fire breaking out has never been greater. This paper proposes a novel methodology for identifying and characterizing zones with increased risks of forest fires. Methods involving machine learning techniques use the widely available and recorded data, thus making it possible to implement the tool quickly.

Comparing Machine Learning Techniques With State-Of-The-Art Parametric Prediction Models For Predicting Soybean Traits, Susweta Ray

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Work

Soybean is a significant source of protein and oil, and also widely used as animal feed. Thus, developing lines that are superior in terms of yield, protein and oil content is important to feed the ever-growing population. As opposed to the high-cost phenotyping, genotyping is both cost and time efficient for breeders while evaluating new lines in different environments (location-year combinations) can be costly. Several Genomic prediction (GP) methods have been developed to use the marker and environment data effectively to predict the yield or other relevant phenotypic traits of crops. Our study compares a conventional GP method (GBLUP), a …

Interpolating Missing Data And Comparing Performance Of Common Interpolation Techniques From A 30-Year Water Quality Dataset, Wako Bungula, Danelle M. Larson Dr., Killian Davis, Richard Erickson Dr., Amber Lee, Casey Mckean, Frederick Miller, Alaina Stockdill, Enrika Hlavacek

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Species Abundance Distributions And The Canon Of Classical Music, Noelle Atkin

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Determining Malignancy: Can Mammogram Results Help Predict The Diagnosis Of Breast Tumors?, Taylor Behrens

Symposium of Student Scholars

Even with advancements in treatment and preventative care, breast cancer remains an epidemic claiming more than 40,000 American male and female lives each year. The mammogram dataset that I am analyzing was initially complied in the early 1990s by a team from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Past research diagnoses breast cancer from fine-needle aspirates. My research focuses on predicting whether we can determine breast cancer diagnoses without the use of invasive procedures and, in particular, whether we can predict breast cancer based on mammogram data. Do measures of gray-scale texture, radius, concavity, perimeter, compactness, area, and smoothness of …

Modeling Reproduction Influencers Of An Endangered Oak, Camila Cortez

DePaul Discoveries

The endemic oak, Quercus brandegeei has been labeled as endangered by the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species due to its limited genetic diversity and lack of regeneration. The oak (Quercus) species is a keystone species in many parts of the world and has been facing various challenges to their survival (Westwood 2017) making efforts to support and protect endemic oaks all the more ecologically and socially imperative. There are challenges to identifying threats as there are many unknown characteristics of Q. brandegeei’s biology that are essential to carrying out conservation efforts. To develop a greater understanding of …

Species In Vernal Pools: Anova, Lisa Manne

Open Educational Resources

A one-way analysis of variance exercise using data on species diversities from vernal pools.Data are from vernal pools in Willowbrook Park (adjacent to College of Staten Island's campus) in spring.

The typical ANOVA gives a straightforward result (significant anova, easily-interpreted Tukey-Kramer analysis). This data set requires more nuanced interpretation, as the ANOVA is marginally significant, and Tukey-Kramer yields one significant pairwise comparison between groups. Relative lack of variation within groups explains this apparent enigma.

Biases And Blind-Spots In Genome-Wide Crispr-Cas9 Knockout Screens, Merve Dede

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Adaptation of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system to mammalian cells revolutionized the field of functional genomics, enabling genome-scale genetic perturbations to study essential genes, whose loss of function results in a severe fitness defect. There are two types of essential genes in a cell. Core essential genes are absolutely required for growth and proliferation in every cell type. On the other hand, context-dependent essential genes become essential in an environmental or genetic context. The concept of context-dependent gene essentiality is particularly important in cancer, since killing cancer cells selectively without harming surrounding healthy tissue remains a major challenge. The toxicity of …