Categorical Data Analysis Commons^™

Biodiversity And Distribution Of Benthic Foraminifera In Harrington Sound, Bermuda: The Effects Of Physical And Geochemical Factors On Dominant Taxa, Nam Le

Honors Theses

Harrington Sound, Bermuda, is a nearly enclosed lagoon acting as a subtropical/tropical, carbonate-rich basin in which carbonate sediments, reef patches, and carbonate-producing organisms accumulate. Here, one of the most important calcareous groups is the Foraminifera. Analyses of common benthic orders, including miliolids (Quinqueloculina and Triloculina spp.) and rotaliids (Homotrema rubrum, Elphidium spp., and Ammonia beccarii), are essential in understanding past and present environmental conditions affecting the island's coastal environment. These taxa have been studied previously; however, factors explaining their individual patterns of abundance in the Sound are not well detailed. The goal of this study is …

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 …

Dimensionality And Factorial Invariance Of Religiosity Among Christians And The Religiously Unaffiliated: A Cross-Cultural Analysis Based On The International Social Survey Programme, Carlos Miguel Lemos, Ross Joseph Gore, Ivan Puga-Gonzalez, F. Leron Shults

VMASC Publications

We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invariance properties, we labeled the three resulting factors …

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 …

A New Independence Measure And Its Applications In High Dimensional Data Analysis, Chenlu Ke

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

This dissertation has three consecutive topics. First, we propose a novel class of independence measures for testing independence between two random vectors based on the discrepancy between the conditional and the marginal characteristic functions. If one of the variables is categorical, our asymmetric index extends the typical ANOVA to a kernel ANOVA that can test a more general hypothesis of equal distributions among groups. The index is also applicable when both variables are continuous. Second, we develop a sufficient variable selection procedure based on the new measure in a large p small n setting. Our approach incorporates marginal information between …

Snap Scholar: The User Experience Of Engaging With Academic Research Through A Tappable Stories Medium, Ieva Burk

CMC Senior Theses

With the shift to learn and consume information through our mobile devices, most academic research is still only presented in long-form text. The Stanford Scholar Initiative has explored the segment of content creation and consumption of academic research through video. However, there has been another popular shift in presenting information from various social media platforms and media outlets in the past few years. Snapchat and Instagram have introduced the concept of tappable “Stories” that have gained popularity in the realm of content consumption.

To accelerate the growth of the creation of these research talks, I propose an alternative to video: …

Improved N-Dimensional Data Visualization From Hyper-Radial Values, Todd J. Paciencia, Trevor J. Bihl, Kenneth W. Bauer

Faculty Publications

Higher-dimensional data, which is becoming common in many disciplines due to big data problems, are inherently difficult to visualize in a meaningful way. While many visualization methods exist, they are often difficult to interpret, involve multiple plots and overlaid points, or require simultaneous interpretations. This research adapts and extends hyper-radial visualization, a technique used to visualize Pareto fronts in multi-objective optimizations, to become an n-dimensional visualization tool. Hyper-radial visualization is seen to offer many advantages by presenting a low-dimensionality representation of data through easily understood calculations. First, hyper-radial visualization is extended for use with general multivariate data. Second, a method …

Application Of Bradford’S Law Of Scattering On Research Publication In Astronomy & Astrophysics Of India, Satish Kumar, Senthilkumar R.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The present study is focused on examining the application of Bradford’s law of scattering on research articles published in the field of Astronomy & Astrophysics by Indian scientist during 1988-2017. The bibliographic data was retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) bibliographic data base for different period of time. Total 18,877 journal’s article have been published by Indian scientist in the field of Astronomy & Astrophysics during 1988-2017 which was further retrieved and analyzed separately for different blocks of 10 years as well as for 30 years consolidated too. The core journal of the field was identified. The Bradford law of …

Instances Of Influenza In The United States Visualized, Parth Patel

Publications and Research

The Tycho Project collects large data sets related to healthcare and in particular, instances and geographical information of diseases. We look at the instance counts and locations of Influenza from 1919-1951 across the United States. We hope to find seasonal and geographical insight to the spread of the disease.

Role Of Misclassification Estimates In Estimating Disease Prevalence And A Non-Linear Approach To Study Synchrony Using Heart Rate Variability In Chickens, Dola Pathak

Department of Statistics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Infectious disease assays can be imperfect. When estimating disease prevalence, these imperfections are accounted for by incorporating assay sensitivity and specificity into point and variance estimates. Unfortunately, these accuracy measures are often treated as fixed constants, rather than acknowledging that they are estimates from an assay validation process. The purpose of this study is to show the detrimental effect of not taking into account this sampling variability when samples are obtained through group testing (aka, pooled testing). We show that confidence interval coverage can dramatically decline as the sample size increases for the main sample of interest. As a remedy …

Text Analytics Approach To Extract Course Improvement Suggestions From Students’ Feedback, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Jeff Rongsheng Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In academic institutions, it is normal practice that at the end of each term, students are required to complete a questionnaire that is designed to gather students’ perceptions of the instructor and their learning experience in the course. Students’ feedback includes numerical answers to Likert scale questions and textual comments to open-ended questions. Within the textual comments given by the students are embedded suggestions. A suggestion can be explicit or implicit. Any suggestion provides useful pointers on how the instructor can further enhance the student learning experience. However, it is tedious to manually go through all the qualitative comments and …

Vpsearch: Achieving Verifiability For Privacy-Preserving Multi-Keyword Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although cloud computing offers elastic computation and storage resources, it poses challenges on verifiability of computations and data privacy. In this work we investigate verifiability for privacy-preserving multi-keyword search over outsourced documents. As the cloud server may return incorrect results due to system faults or incentive to reduce computation cost, it is critical to offer verifiability of search results and privacy protection for outsourced data at the same time. To fulfill these requirements, we design aVerifiablePrivacy-preserving keywordSearch scheme, called VPSearch, by integrating an adapted homomorphic MAC technique with a privacy-preserving multi-keyword search scheme. The proposed scheme enables the client to …

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 …

Identifying Key Factors Associated With High Risk Asthma Patients To Reduce The Cost Of Health Resources Utilization, Amani Ahmad

LSU Master's Theses

Asthma is associated with frequent use of primary health services and places a burden on the United States economy. Identifying key factors associated with increased cost of asthma is an essential step to improve practices of asthma management.

The aim of this study was to identify factors associated with over utilization of primary health services and increased cost via claims data and to explore the effectiveness of case management program in reducing overall asthma related cost.

Claims data analysis for Medicaid insured asthma patients in Louisiana was conducted. Asthma patients were identified using their ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes, forward variable …

Minimizing The Perceived Financial Burden Due To Cancer, Hassan Azhar, Zoheb Allam, Gino Varghese, Daniel W. Engels, Sajiny John

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a regression model that predicts perceived financial burden that a cancer patient experiences in the treatment and management of the disease. Cancer patients do not fully understand the burden associated with the cost of cancer, and their lack of understanding can increase the difficulties associated with living with the disease, in particular coping with the cost. The relationship between demographic characteristics and financial burden were examined in order to better understand the characteristics of a cancer patient and their burden, while all subsets regression was used to determine the best predictors of financial burden. Age, …

Cryptocurrency Price Prediction Using Tweet Volumes And Sentiment Analysis, Jethin Abraham, Daniel Higdon, John Nelson, Juan Ibarra

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a method for predicting changes in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices utilizing Twitter data and Google Trends data. Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization represent over \$160 billion dollars in combined value. However, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have experienced significant price swings on both daily and long term valuations. Twitter is increasingly used as a news source influencing purchase decisions by informing users of the currency and its increasing popularity. As a result, quickly understanding the impact of tweets on price direction can provide a purchasing and selling advantage to …

Bubble Stream Production By Belugas (Delphinapterus Leucas), Megan Slack

Theses

Bubble stream production in belugas has been poorly characterized and its function is not well understood. I examined behavioral states when producing bubble streams (“bubbling”), and when bubbling calls, to determine whether bubbling was significantly associated with a particular call category or behavioral state. Using 19 hours of video and audio recordings collected over a two-day period, I quantified bubble streams of a 4-month old calf and an unrelated adult female housed together. Based on the overall activity budgets and pool of vocalizations for both animals, I calculated the expected counts of bubble streams with and without vocalizations, assuming that …

Efvs Effects On Pilot Performance, Michael Campbell, Nsikak Udo-Imeh, Steven J. Landry

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Flight tests have been conducted at Purdue University using a computer-based flying simulator in an attempt to determine and measure the effects of Enhanced Flight Vision Systems (EFVS) on the performance of pilots during landing. Knowledge of these effects could help guide future design and implementation of EFVS in modern commercial aircraft, and further increase pilots’ ability to control the aircraft in low-visibility conditions. The problem that has faced researchers in the past has revolved around the difficulty in interpreting the data which is generated by these tests. The difficulty in making a generalized conclusion based on the large amount …

Pretrial Release And Failure-To-Appear In Mclean County, Il, Jonathan Monsma

Student Research – Stevenson Center

Actuarial risk assessment tools increasingly have been employed in jurisdictions across the U.S. to assist courts in the decision of whether someone charged with a crime should be detained or released prior to their trial. These tools should be continually monitored and researched by independent 3^rd parties to ensure that these powerful tools are being administered properly and used in the most proficient way as to provide socially optimal results. McLean County, Illinois began using the Public Safety Assessment-Court^TM (PSA-Court or simply PSA) risk assessment tool beginning in 2016. This study culls data from the McLean County Jail …

Data Center Application Security: Lateral Movement Detection Of Malware Using Behavioral Models, Harinder Pal Singh Bhasin, Elizabeth Ramsdell, Albert Alva, Rajiv Sreedhar, Medha Bhadkamkar

SMU Data Science Review

Data center security traditionally is implemented at the external network access points, i.e., the perimeter of the data center network, and focuses on preventing malicious software from entering the data center. However, these defenses do not cover all possible entry points for malicious software, and they are not 100% effective at preventing infiltration through the connection points. Therefore, security is required within the data center to detect malicious software activity including its lateral movement within the data center. In this paper, we present a machine learning-based network traffic analysis approach to detect the lateral movement of malicious software within the …