Data Science Commons^™

Digital Technology Needs In Maternal Mental Health: A Qualitative Inquiry, Sudhakar Selvaraj, Jerrie Refuerzo, Sahiti Myneni

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Digital technologies offer many opportunities to improve mental healthcare management for women seeking pre- and-postnatal care. They provide a discrete, practical medium that is well-suited for the sensitive nature of mental health. Women who are more prone to experiencing peripartum depression (PPD), such as those of low-socioeconomic background or in high-risk pregnancies, can benefit the most from such technologies. However, current digital interventions directed towards this population provide suboptimal support, and their responsiveness to end user needs is quite limited. Our objective is to understand the digital terrain of information needs for low-socioeconomic status women with high-risk pregnancies, specifically within …

Spaceflight And The Differential Gene Expression Of Human Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes, Eugenie Zhu

Master's Projects

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has performed many experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) to further understand how conditions in space can affect life on Earth. This project analyzed GLDS-258, a gene set from NASA’s GeneLab repository which examines the impact of microgravity on human induced pluripotent stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). While many datasets have been run through NASA’s RNA-Seq Consensus Pipeline (RCP) to study differential gene expression in space, a Homo sapiens dataset has yet to be analyzed using the RCP. The aim of this project was to run the first Homo sapiens dataset, GLDS-258, through the …

Prediction Of Financial Capacity Using Diffusion Compartment Imaging, Lok Yi Tai

Master's Projects

Financial Capacity (FC) is the ability to manage one’s financial affairs, which is essential for autonomy and independence particularly for aging adults. Since dementia develops gradually, it is often difficult to detect the early signs that this cognitive dysfunction is developing This project aims to use Neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) to identify the white matter tracts that are associated with FC. Diffusion Tensor Images (DTI) and T1 Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) of 18 Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) subjects, 47 Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) subjects, and 193 healthy control (CN) are compared to neuropsychological tests. Orientation Dispersion Index (ODI) …

Wildfire Risk Prediction For A Smart City, Rekha Rani

Master's Projects

Wildfires are uncontrolled fires that may lead to the destruction of biodiversity, soil fertility, and human resources. There is a need for timely detection and prediction of wildfires to minimize their disastrous effects. In this research, we propose a wildfire prediction model that relies on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) to explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision making and weave the wildfire risks into the city’s resiliency plan. We incorporate fuzzy set theory to handle imprecision and uncertainties. In the process, we create a new data set that includes California cities’ weather, vegetation, topography, and population density records. The model …

An Empirical Study Of Refactorings And Technical Debt In Machine Learning Systems, Yiming Tang, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Rhia Singh, Ajani Stewart, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Machine Learning (ML), including Deep Learning (DL), systems, i.e., those with ML capabilities, are pervasive in today’s data-driven society. Such systems are complex; they are comprised of ML models and many subsystems that support learning processes. As with other complex systems, ML systems are prone to classic technical debt issues, especially when such systems are long-lived, but they also exhibit debt specific to these systems. Unfortunately, there is a gap of knowledge in how ML systems actually evolve and are maintained. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying refactorings, i.e., source-to-source semantics-preserving program transformations, performed in real-world, open-source …

Visualizing Decision Trees And Forests Using Radial Trees, Angela Kozma

Computer Science and Information Technology Faculty

Data visualization has become a big representation of many company’s data and schedules. Now people are not using just simple bar graphs and pie charts in business meetings but utilizing other fields of study and even more complex graphs. By using multiple visualizations to display their results and projects, it is letting more outside people understand what they are working on and can lead to more viewpoints on the topic being displayed. Also, schedules for projects are now being displayed visually so the workers can see how much time each part of their project is going to take. With this …

Federated Learning In Gaze Recognition (Fligr), Arun Gopal Govindaswamy

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The efficiency and generalizability of a deep learning model is based on the amount and diversity of training data. Although huge amounts of data are being collected, these data are not stored in centralized servers for further data processing. It is often infeasible to collect and share data in centralized servers due to various medical data regulations. This need for diversely distributed data and infeasible storage solutions calls for Federated Learning (FL). FL is a clever way of utilizing privately stored data in model building without the need for data sharing. The idea is to train several different models locally …

Improving Additional Adversarial Robustness For Classification, Michael Guo

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Although neural networks have achieved remarkable success on classification, adversarial robustness is still a significant concern. There are now a series of approaches for designing adversarial examples and methods to defending against them. This paper consists of two projects. In our first work, we propose an approach by leveraging cognitive salience to enhance additional robustness on top of these methods. Specifically, for image classification, we split an image into the foreground (salient region) and background (the rest) and allow significantly larger adversarial perturbations in the background to produce stronger attacks. Furthermore, we show that adversarial training with dual-perturbation attacks yield …

Reporting Of Eating Disorder Deaths, Katherine Mobley, Amy Hord

Symposium of Student Scholars

Those affected by eating disorders experience disturbances in eating behaviors which are often related to underlying psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (Parekh, 2017, Drieberg et al., 1998 p.53). The duplicitous nature of the disorder makes it difficult to diagnose, and the tole it takes on an individual’s physical health makes its mortality rate the second highest among psychiatric disorders (Guinhut et al., 2021 p.130). Even if the correct education and resources are accessible to certain individuals, negative stigmatization about the disorder can make sufferers unlikely to seek help (Becker et al., 2010). Findings from analysis of …

Med-Bert: Pretrained Contextualized Embeddings On Large-Scale Structured Electronic Health Records For Disease Prediction, Degui Zhi

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Deep learning (DL)-based predictive models from electronic health records (EHRs) deliver impressive performance in many clinical tasks. Large training cohorts, however, are often required by these models to achieve high accuracy, hindering the adoption of DL-based models in scenarios with limited training data. Recently, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and related models have achieved tremendous successes in the natural language processing domain. The pretraining of BERT on a very large training corpus generates contextualized embeddings that can boost the performance of models trained on smaller datasets. Inspired by BERT, we propose Med-BERT, which adapts the BERT framework originally developed …

Characterizing The Northern Hemisphere Circumpolar Vortex Through Space And Time, Nazla Bushra

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This hemispheric-scale, steering atmospheric circulation represented by the circumpolar vortices (CPVs) are the middle- and upper-tropospheric wind belts circumnavigating the poles. Variability in the CPV area, shape, and position are important topics in geoenvironmental sciences because of the many links to environmental features. However, a means of characterizing the CPV has remained elusive. The goal of this research is to (i) identify the Northern Hemisphere CPV (NHCPV) and its morphometric characteristics, (ii) understand the daily characteristics of NHCPV area and circularity over time, (iii) identify and analyze spatiotemporal variability in the NHCPV’s centroid, and (iv) analyze how CPV features relate …

Machine Learning Methods For Depression Detection Using Smri And Rs-Fmri Images, Marzieh Sadat Mousavian

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Major Depression Disorder (MDD) is a common disease throughout the world that negatively influences people’s lives. Early diagnosis of MDD is beneficial, so detecting practical biomarkers would aid clinicians in the diagnosis of MDD. Having an automated method to find biomarkers for MDD is helpful even though it is difficult. The main aim of this research is to generate a method for detecting discriminative features for MDD diagnosis based on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data.

In this research, representational similarity analysis provides a framework to compare distributed patterns and obtain the similarity/dissimilarity of brain regions. Regions are obtained by either …

Using Machine Learning Methods To Predict The Movement Trajectories Of The Louisiana Black Bear, Daniel Clark, David Shaw, Armando Vela, Shane Weinstock, John Santerre, Joseph D. Clark

SMU Data Science Review

In 1992, the Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus) was placed on the U.S. Endangered Species List. This was due to bear populations in Louisiana being small and isolated enough where their populations couldn’t intersect with other populations to grow. Interchange of individuals between subpopulations of bears in Louisiana is critical to maintain genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding effects. Utilizing GPS (Global Positioning System) data gathered from 31 radio-collared bears from 2010 through 2012, this research will investigate how bears traverse the landscape, which has implications for gene exchange. This paper will leverage machine learning tools to improve upon existing …

Analyzing Empirical Quality Metrics Of Deep Learning Models For Antimicrobial Resistance, Huy H. Nguyen, Sanjay Pillay, Allison Roderick, Hao Wang, John Santerre

SMU Data Science Review

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a growing concern in the medical field. Over-prescription of antibiotics as well as bacterial mutations have caused some once lifesaving drugs to become ineffective against bacteria. However, the problem of AMR might be addressed using Machine Learning (ML) thanks to increased availability of genomic data and large computing resources. The Pathosystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC) has genomic data of various bacterial genera with sample isolates that are either resistant or susceptible to certain antibiotics. Past research has used this database to use ML algorithms to model AMR with successful results, including accuracies over 80%. To better …

Quantitative Intersectional Data (Quinta): A #Metoo Case Study, Alicia E. Boyd

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This research began as an investigation of the #metoo movement, with the initial impetus to illuminate the voices located on the margins, those who often go unheard or are never recognized. This work aimed to understand the intersectional aspects of how these hashtag variations of the hashtag #metoo (i.e. #metoomosque, #churchtoo, #metoodisable, #metooqueer, #metoochina, etc) reveal the inequities of the #metoo movement on Twitter. The proliferation of these hashtag variations has often been ignored by scholars, and therefore absorbed into the larger #metoo movement conversation on Twitter. Therefore, the term `hashtag derivative' was created to describe the variation on the …

Analysis Of Individual Player Performances And Their Effect On Winning In College Soccer, Angelo Bravo, Thomas Karba, Sean Mcwhirter, Billy Nayden

SMU Data Science Review

This study describes the process of modernizing the approach of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Men's Soccer coaching staff through the use of location and tracking data from their matches in the 2019 season. This study utilizes a variety of modeling and analysis techniques to explore and categorize the data and use it to evaluate the types of plays that are most often correlated with victories. This study's contribution to college soccer analytics includes the implementation of a model to determine individual players' performance, the production of team-level metrics, and visualizations to increase the efficiency of the coaching staff's efforts. …

Machine Learning In The Health Industry: Predicting Congestive Heart Failure And Impactors, Alexandra Norman, James Harding, Daria Zhukova

SMU Data Science Review

Cardiovascular diseases, Congestive Heart Failure in particular, are a leading cause of deaths worldwide. Congestive Heart Failure has high mortality and morbidity rates. The key to decreasing the morbidity and mortality rates associated with Congestive Heart Failure is determining a method to detect high-risk individuals prior to the development of this often-fatal disease. Providing high-risk individuals with advanced knowledge of risk factors that could potentially lead to Congestive Heart Failure, enhances the likelihood of preventing the disease through implementation of lifestyle changes for healthy living. When dealing with healthcare and patient data, there are restrictions that led to difficulties accessing …

Generating And Smoothing Handwriting With Long Short-Term Memory Networks, Muchigi Kimari, Edward Fry, Ikenna Nwaogu, Yumei Bennett, John Santerre

SMU Data Science Review

This project explores the different neural network methods to generate synthetic handwriting text. The goal is to offer an AI tool that generates handwriting, while maintaining an individual’s style, to people suffering with Dysgraphia. As part of this project, an application development framework is setup on GitHub, in such a way that others can continue to explore and improve the AI tool.

A Machine Learning Method Of Determining Causal Inference Applied To Shifts In Voting Preferences Between 2012-2016, Jaclyn A. Coate, Reagan Meagher, Megan Riley, John Santerre

SMU Data Science Review

This research investigates the application of machine learning techniques to assist in the execution of a synthetic control model. This model was performed to analyze counties within the United States that showed a voter shift from a majority of Democratic voter share to Republican between the 2012 and 2016 election cycles. The following study applies two steps of machine learning analysis. The first, which is the treatment discovery process, leverages a Random Forest to evaluate feature importance. The second step was the execution of the synthetic control model with two predictor variable lists. The first was the parametric method: …

Automated Analysis Of Rfps Using Natural Language Processing (Nlp) For The Technology Domain, Sterling Beason, William Hinton, Yousri A. Salamah, Jordan Salsman

SMU Data Science Review

Much progress has been made in text analysis, specifically within the statistical domain of Term Frequency (TF) and Inverse Document Frequency (IDF). However, there is much room for improvement especially within the area of discovering Emerging Trends. Emerging Trend Detection Systems (ETDS) depend on ingesting a collection of textual data and TF/IDF to identify new or up-trending topics within the Corpus. However, the tremendous rate of change and the amount of digital information presents a challenge that makes it almost impossible for a human expert to spot emerging trends without relying on an automated ETD system. Since the U.S. Government …