Statistics and Probability Commons^™

A Predictive Model To Predict Cyberattack Using Self-Normalizing Neural Networks, Oluwapelumi Eniodunmo

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Cyberattack is a never-ending war that has greatly threatened secured information systems. The development of automated and intelligent systems provides more computing power to hackers to steal information, destroy data or system resources, and has raised global security issues. Statistical and Data mining tools have received continuous research and improvements. These tools have been adopted to create sophisticated intrusion detection systems that help information systems mitigate and defend against cyberattacks. However, the advancement in technology and accessibility of information makes more identifiable elements that can be used to gain unauthorized access to systems and resources. Data mining and classification tools …

Long-Read Sequencing Of The Zebrafish Genome Reorganizes Genomic Architecture, Yelena Chernyavskaya, Xiaofei Zhang, Jinze Liu, Jessica Blackburn

Biostatistics Publications

Background

Nanopore sequencing technology has revolutionized the field of genome biology with its ability to generate extra-long reads that can resolve regions of the genome that were previously inaccessible to short-read sequencing platforms. Over 50% of the zebrafish genome consists of difficult to map, highly repetitive, low complexity elements that pose inherent problems for short-read sequencers and assemblers.

Results

We used long-read nanopore sequencing to generate a de novo assembly of the zebrafish genome and compared our assembly to the current reference genome, GRCz11. The new assembly identified 1697 novel insertions and deletions over one kilobase in length and placed …

Don’T Beep At Me: Using Google Maps Apis To Reduce Driving Anxiety, Daniel Chechelnitsky

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Stress while driving is a significant issue that causes automobile incidents. Along with the physical injuries, there is often baggage and trauma associated with these accidents. Wearable health monitoring technology, like Smartwatches, has a real possibility to help people further understand the stress inducing processes of driving. Thus to help with this issue, I propose a Google Maps app extension called: "Don't Beep At Me". This project creates a map that is layered by heart rate instead of speed limit and has great potential to be useful for reducing driving anxiety.

A Participatory Group Process To Collect And Disseminate Covid-19 Needs Assessment Data, Areebah Ahmed

UROP Posters

The Richmond, VA COVID-19 Needs Assessment Survey (RVA CoNA) was created in March 2020 to identify behaviors and needs related to COVID-19 in Richmond area adults ages 18 and over. Results are being used to inform support, strategic efforts, and educational outreach of local community organizations. The purpose of this study is to (1) summarize the process used to develop the RVA CoNA, (2) summarize preliminary survey results from a second phase of data collection as well as initial feedback from community partners, and (3) summarize initial conclusions and results dissemination strategies.Community partners and researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University jointly …

Development And Initial Validation Of An Acculturation Measure For Arab Expatriates In Qatar Using Mixed Methods, Sara Ali Ahmed Zikri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prior research on acculturation has predominantly focused on specific immigrant and ethnic groups in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and there is a lack of publicly available scales that measure acculturation among expatriates in countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The purpose of this study was to use a mixed methods research design to develop a theoretical framework of acculturation for white-collar Arab expatriates in Qatar as well as a culturally appropriate self-report acculturation measure. The acculturation stories and experiences of white-collar Arab expatriates in Qatar were qualitatively explored and analyzed, and their findings were used to construct an …

Approximating Bayesian Optimal Sequential Designs Using Gaussian Process Models Indexed On Belief States, Joseph Burris

Theses and Dissertations

Fully sequential optimal Bayesian experimentation can offer greater utility than both traditional Bayesian designs and greedy sequential methods, but practically cannot be solved due to numerical complexity and continuous outcome spaces. Approximate solutions can be found via approximate dynamic programming, but rely on surrogate models of the expected utility at each trial of the experiment with hand-chosen features or use methods which ignore the underlying geometry of the space of probability distributions. We propose the use of Gaussian process models indexed on the belief states visited in experimentation to provide utility-agnostic surrogate models for approximating Bayesian optimal sequential designs which …

Informative G-Prior For Linear Models, Yu-Fang Chien

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Zellner's objective g-prior has been widely used in linear regression models due to its simple interpretation and computational tractability in evaluating marginal likelihoods. However, the g-prior further allows portioning the prior variability explained by the linear predictor versus that of pure noise. Here, a novel, yet remarkably simple g-prior speci_cation is proposed when a subject-matter expert has information on the marginal distribution of the response yi. The approach is extended for use in mixed models with some surprising, but intuitive results. Also, this formulation of g-prior is compared with other approaches via simulation studies.

Using Deep Neural Networks To Analyze Precision Agriculture Data, Stephanie Liebl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the population of the Earth increases, there is a growing need for food to feed the inhabitants. Precision agriculture offers techniques and tools that can be used to help accommodate the growing population. One specific precision agriculture tool is remote sensing data, which can be used to image fields as an effort to better predict or understand the crops. In this thesis, deep neural networks are used to evaluate various spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions of three different satellite images to determine which best predicts corn yield. The main metrics we used to evaluate the models were R-squared (R2), …

Sampling Distribution Of Non-Overlap Indices Using Bootstrapping Procedure : A Monte Carlo Simulation Study And Empirical Demonstration, Xinyun Xu

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Statistics can be either parametric or non-parametric, depending on whether distributional assumptions about the data and sampling distributions are required. Parametric and non-parametric approaches each include a variety of inferential methods. These methods can be seen in the field of single-case experimental design (SCED). By reviewing one of the most used groups of statistics for SCED research (Jamshidi et al., 2022; Maggin et al., 2011), the non-overlap indices, one major issue arose. It is challenging to make inferences and interpretations about non-overlap indices. The main reason for this issue is that non-overlap indices have inconsistent and unknown sampling distributions (under …

The Role Of Health Expenditure On Health Outcomes: Evidence In West Africa Countries., Festus Efosa Eriamiatoe

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study investigates the role of health expenditure on health outcomes in West Africa countries. Using the Grossman theoretical framework, other variables that affect health outcomes were also examined. Sixteen countries of West Africa with yearly data spanning between the period of 19 years (2000-2019) was used in this study. The health outcomes examined include life expectancy and neonatal and under-5 mortality rates. The regressors used in the study include domestic government health expenditure per capita, domestic private health expenditure per capita, external health expenditure per capita, carbon-dioxide emission metric ton per capita, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), unemployment, GDP per …

A Monte Carlo Simulation Of Rat Choice Behavior With Interdependent Outcomes, Michelle A. Frankot

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Preclinical behavioral neuroscience often uses choice paradigms to capture psychiatric symptoms. In particular, the subfield of operant research produces nested datasets with many discrete choices in a session. The standard analytic practice is to aggregate choice into a continuous variable and analyze using ANOVA or linear regression. However, choice data often have multiple interdependent outcomes of interest, violating an assumption of general linear models. The aim of the current study was to quantify the accuracy of linear mixed-effects regression (LMER) for analyzing data from a 4-choice operant task called the Rodent Gambling Task (RGT), which measures decision-making in the context …

Examining The Credibility Of Story-Based Causal Methodologies, Megan E. Kauffmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore how evaluators justify using story-based methodologies when examining causality. The two primary research questions of the study included: 1) what arguments are made by evaluators to justify the credibility of story-based causal methodologies to evaluation stakeholders; and 2) from the perspective of evaluators, how do contextual factors influence whether story-based causal methodologies are perceived as credible by evaluation stakeholders? A case study was conducted to examine the cases of four evaluators who had experience implementing a story-based methodology in an evaluation. Data collection procedures included two interviews with each participant and a …

Application Of An Organizational Evaluation Capacity Assessment In A Multinational Ngo: A Case Study To Support Applied Practice, Ryan James Smyth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As evaluation capacity building (ECB) has rapidly emerged as a practice in human service organizations and as a field of academic inquiry, attention has focused on methods of evaluation capacity building while assessment of organizational evaluation capacity (EC) has lagged behind. To examine the practice of organizational evaluation capacity assessment, this dissertation presents two separate but related studies. In sub-study 1, I present a qualitative evidence synthesis of the research theorizing organizational evaluation capacity models. In sub-study 2, I support the implementation of one of the tools from the evidence-synthesis at a multinational human service organization. I use a concurrent …

Using Short Bursts To Optimize Redistricting In Georgia, Vedika Vishweshwar

CMC Senior Theses

Identifying extreme outliers in large state spaces is a difficult prob-
lem. I consider this problem in the context of finding political district-
ing plans that maximize the number of districts in which the majority
of the population is from a minority group, such as African Americans.
Since the set of all possible districting plans is enormous and unfeasi-
ble to examine in practice, this paper proposes a sampling method to
find these outlying plans. Specifically, this paper experiments with short
bursts in the context of minority voting rights in Georgia. Short bursts
are a type of Markov Chain in …

Containing Compounding Container Congestion, Curtis Salinger

CMC Senior Theses

The Covid-19 pandemic caused major disruptions throughout the container shipping supply chain. Professor Dongping Song of Liverpool University wrote a paper discussing the logistical vulnerabilities in the supply chain, including the issue of congestion in ports. This paper examines the Port of Los Angeles from 2018-2021 as it relates to Song’s paper to see how its operations were impacted during the Covid-19 timeframe. It is found that labor shortages, chassis shortages, and change in trade behavior each contributed to the congestion. Unfortunately, the implemented policies were insufficient to bolster the port against sustained challenges and congestion continues to worsen.

Review Of Copula For Bivariate Distributions Of Zero-Inflated Count Time Series Data, Dimuthu Fernando, Mohammed Alqawba, Manar Samad, Norou Diawara

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

The class of bivariate integer-valued time series models, described via copula theory, is gaining popularity in the literature because of applications in health sciences, engineering, financial management and more. Each time series follows a Markov chain with the serial dependence captured using copula-based distribution functions from the Poisson and the zero-inflated Poisson margins. The copula theory is again used to capture the dependence between the two series.

However, the efficiency and adaptability of the copula are being challenged because of the discrete nature of data and also in the case of zero-inflation of count time series. Likelihood-based inference is used …

Methods Of Anomaly Detection: An Applied Framework And Application To Health Economics, Nathaniel Eric Islip

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

การปรับปรุงความสามารถในการพยากรณ์แบบไบนารี่โดยใช้การเรียนรู้เมตาแบบถ่วงน้ำหนักแบบปรับสำหรับการจำแนกความยากจนระดับครัวเรือนในประเทศไทย, ธารินทร์ สุขเนาว์

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาปัจจัยที่มีความสัมพันธ์กับความยากจนในระดับครัวเรือนและเสนอวิธีการเปรียบเทียบและปรับปรุงความสามารถในการพยากรณ์แบบไบนารี่โดยใช้การเรียนรู้เมตาแบบถ่วงน้ำหนักแบบปรับจากการคำนวนค่าถ่วงน้ำหนักวิธีที่ดีที่สุดสำหรับการจำแนกความยากจนระดับครัวเรือนในประเทศไทย โดยนำเสนอวิธีการสองขั้นตอน คือนำตัววัดประสิทธิภาพการทำนายมาใช้ในการคำนวณค่าถ่วงน้ำหนักแบบปรับ ซึ่งนำมาใช้เสมือนเป็นค่าถ่วงน้ำหนักเริ่มต้นที่ให้กับแต่ละตัวแบบ จากนั้นจึงทำนายผลด้วยวิธีการวิเคราะห์การถดถอยลอจิสติกอีกขั้นตอนหนึ่ง งานวิจัยนี้ศึกษาการคำนวณค่าถ่วงน้ำหนักแบบปรับจากตัววัดประสิทธิภาพการทำนายใน 3 กรณี ได้แก่ 1. การใช้ค่า AUC 2. การใช้ค่า F1-Score โดยพิจารณาจุดตัด 0.5 และ 3. การใช้ค่า F1-Score โดยพิจารณาค่าจุดตัดที่เหมาะสมที่สุดจากดัชนีโยเดนที่สูงสุด นอกจากนี้ เนื่องจากชุดข้อมูลสำรวจประชากรรายครัวเรือนในระดับพื้นที่มีความไม่สมดุลของระดับความยากจน จึงใช้เทคนิค SMOTE ในการจัดการกับข้อมูลที่ไม่สมดุล ทั้งนี้ ผู้วิจัยได้ทำการเปรียบเทียบผลลัพธ์จากชุดข้อมูลก่อนและหลังใช้เทคนิค SMOTE ผลการศึกษาพบว่า ปัจจัยที่มีความสัมพันธ์กับความยากจนในระดับครัวเรือนสูงมีหลายปัจจัย อาทิ อายุของหัวหน้าครัวเรือน จำนวนผู้ที่ได้รับบัตรสวัสดิการแห่งรัฐในครัวเรือน,ค่าใช้จ่ายเพื่อการบริโภคในครัวเรือน เป็นต้น และวิธีการคำนวณค่าถ่วงน้ำหนักแบบปรับจากตัววัดประสิทธิภาพ F1-Score ที่จุดตัด 0.5 มีประสิทธิภาพสูงสุดจากการพิจารณาด้วยค่าความแม่นยำในชุดข้อมูลตั้งต้นก่อนใช้เทคนิค SMOTE อย่างไรก็ตาม จากการทดสอบในชุดข้อมูลที่มีการจัดการกับข้อมูลที่ไม่สมดุลด้วยวิธี SMOTE พบว่า ประสิทธิภาพในการทำนายไม่ปรากฏว่าวิธีการคำนวณค่าถ่วงน้ำหนักแบบปรับจากตัววัดประสิทธิภาพแบบใดแบบหนึ่งที่มีประสิทธิภาพสูงสุดอย่างชัดเจน

Comparison Of Caregiver- And Child-Reported Quality Of Life In Children With Sleep-Disordered Breathing, Phoebe Kuo Yu, Kaitlyn Cook, Jiayan Liu, Raouf S. Amin, Craig Derkay, Lisa M. Elden, Susan L. Garetz, Alisha S. George, Sally Ibrahim, Stacey L. Ishman, Erin M. Kirkham, S. Kamal Naqvi, Jerilynn Radcliffe, Kristie R. Ross, Gopi B. Shah, Ignacio E. Tapia, H. Gerry Taylor, David A. Zopf, Susan Redline, Cristina M. Baldassari

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Objective. Caregivers frequently report poor quality of life(QOL) in children with sleep-disordered breathing (SDB).Our objective is to assess the correlation between care-giver- and child-reported QOL in children with mild SDBand identify factors associated with differences between caregiver and child report.

Study Design. Analysis of baseline data from a multi-institutional randomized trialSetting. Pediatric Adenotonsillectomy Trial for Snoring, where children with mild SDB (obstructive apnea-hypopnea index\3) were randomized to observation or adenotonsillectomy.

Methods. The Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (Peds QL)assessed baseline global QOL in participating children 5 to12 years old and their caregivers. Caregiver and child scores were compared. Multivariable regression …

The Online Ordering Behaviors Among Participants In The Oklahoma Women, Infants, And Children Program: A Cross-Sectional Analysis, Qi Zhang, Kayoung Park, Junzhou Zhang, Chuanyi Tang

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a nutrition assistance program in the United States (U.S.). Participants in the program redeem their prescribed food benefits in WIC-authorized grocery stores. Online ordering is an innovative method being pilot-tested in some stores to facilitate WIC participants' food benefit redemption, which has become especially important in the COVID-19 pandemic. The present research aimed to examine the online ordering (OO) behaviors among 726 WIC households who adopted WIC OO in a grocery chain, XYZ (anonymous) store, in Oklahoma (OK). These households represented approximately 5% of WIC households who redeemed …