Statistics and Probability Commons^™

Be Careful! That Is Probably Bullshit! Review Of Calling Bullshit: The Art Of Skepticism In A Data-Driven World By Carl T. Bergstrom And Jevin D. West, James B. Schreiber

Numeracy

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. 2021. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. NY: Random House. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509189

The authors provide a journey through the numerical bullshit that surrounds our daily lives. Each chapter has multiple examples of specific types of bullshit that each of us experience on any given day. Most importantly, information on how to identify bullshit and refute it are provided so that reader finishes the book with a set of skills to be a more engaged and critical interpreter of information. The writing has a quick and lively …

Clinical Outcomes Of Molecular Tumor Boards: A Systematic Review, Kara L. Larson, Bin Huang, Heidi L. Weiss, Pamela C. Hull, Philip M. Westgate, Rachel W. Miller, Susanne M. Arnold, Jill M. Kolesar

Markey Cancer Center Faculty Publications

PURPOSE: We conducted this systematic review to evaluate the clinical outcomes associated with molecular tumor board (MTB) review in patients with cancer.

METHODS: A systematic search of PubMed was performed to identify studies reporting clinical outcomes in patients with cancer who were reviewed by an MTB. To be included, studies had to report clinical outcomes, including clinical benefit, response, progression-free survival, or overall survival. Two reviewers independently selected studies and assessed quality with the Quality Assessment Tool for Before-After (Pre-Post) Studies with No Control Group or the Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies depending on the type …

Pattern Of Use Of Electronic Health Record (Ehr) Among The Chronically Ill: A Health Information National Trend Survey (Hints) Analysis, Rose Calixte, Sumaiya Islam, Zainab Toteh Osakwe, Argelis Rivera, Marlene Camacho-Rivera

Publications and Research

Effective patient–provider communication is a cornerstone of patient-centered care. Patient portals provide an effective method for secure communication between patients or their proxies and their health care providers. With greater acceptability of patient portals in private practices, patients have a unique opportunity to manage their health care needs. However, studies have shown that less than 50% of patients reported accessing the electronic health record (EHR) in a 12-month period. We used HINTS 5 cycle 1 and cycle 2 to assess disparities among US residents 18 and older with any chronic condition regarding the use of EHR for secure direct messaging …

Cognitive Complaints In Age-Related Chronic Conditions: A Systematic Review, Nikki L. Hill, Sakshi Bhargava, Monique J. Brown, Hyejin Kim, Iris Bhang, Kaitlyn Mullin, Kathleen Phillips, Jacqueline Mogle

Faculty Publications

Introduction

Cognitive complaints in older adults may be indicative of progressive cognitive decline including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but also occur in other age-related chronic conditions, complicating identification of early AD symptoms. To better understand cognitive complaints in aging, we systematically reviewed the evidence to determine their prevalence and characterization among older adults with the most common age-related chronic conditions.

Methods

This systematic review was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement and the review protocol was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (ID: CRD42020153147). Searches were conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and …

Association Of Chronic Pain With Participation In Motor Skill Activities In Children With Cerebral Palsy, Haresh Rochani, Christopher M. Modlesky, Barbara Weissman, Joshua Vova, Gavin T. Colquitt

Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Environmental Health Sciences: Faculty Publications

Many children with cerebral palsy (CP) experience the secondary condition of pain, which is problematic because children with CP face barriers to participation in motor skill activities.^1,2 Motor performance in activities of daily living among children with CP is markedly lower than that among their age-matched peers.³ Because of the potential effect of pain on children with CP, we sought to examine the association between pain and activities requiring motor skill performance (ie, difficulty dressing or bathing and participation in sport) among a nationally representative sample of US children with CP.

Development And Validation Of A Scale To Measure Songwriting Self-Efficacy (Sses) With Secondary Music Students, Patrick K. Cooper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social cognitive theory was developed to explain how individuals learn, in part, by witnessing the behavior of others. Self-efficacy is a construct within social cognitive theory which indicates the beliefs that an individual can be successful at a task under specific situational demands. The sources of self-efficacy include self-evaluating past experiences to predict future success, comparing our abilities to those around us, the verbal and social feedback we get from others, and the physiological feelings we experience when engaged in or thinking about the task. Measures of self-efficacy have been shown to be accurate predictors of successful learning outcomes, achievement, …

A Kinetic Model For Blood Biomarker Levels After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, Sima Azizi, Daniel B. Hier, Blaine Allen, Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi, Gayla R. Olbricht, Matthew S. Thimgan, Donald C. Wunsch

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) imposes a significant economic and social burden. The diagnosis and prognosis of mild TBI, also called concussion, is challenging. Concussions are common among contact sport athletes. After a blow to the head, it is often difficult to determine who has had a concussion, who should be withheld from play, if a concussed athlete is ready to return to the field, and which concussed athlete will develop a post-concussion syndrome. Biomarkers can be detected in the cerebrospinal fluid and blood after traumatic brain injury and their levels may have prognostic value. Despite significant investigation, questions remain as …

Covid-19 And The Impact On Rural And Black Church Congregants: Results Of The C-M-C Project, Lovoria B. Williams, Anita F. Fernander, Tofial Azam, Maria L. Gomez, Junghee Kang, Cassidy L. Moody, Hannah Bowman, Nancy E. Schoenberg

Nursing Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on Black and rural populations with a mortality rate among Blacks three times that of Whites and both rural and Black populations experiencing limited access to COVID-19 resources. The primary purpose of this study was to explore the health, financial, and psychological impact of COVID-19 among rural White Appalachian and Black nonrural central Kentucky church congregants. Secondarily we sought to examine the association between sociodemographics and behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs regarding COVID-19 and intent to vaccinate. We used a cross sectional survey design developed with the constructs of the Health Belief and Theory …

Traveling Wave Solutions For Two Species Competitive Chemotaxis Systems, T. B. Issa, Richadi B. Salako, W. Shen

Mathematical Sciences Faculty Research

In this paper, we consider two species chemotaxis systems with Lotka–Volterra competition reaction terms. Under appropriate conditions on the parameters in such a system, we establish the existence of traveling wave solutions of the system connecting two spatially homogeneous equilibrium solutions with wave speed greater than some critical number c∗. We also show the non-existence of such traveling waves with speed less than some critical number c0∗, which is independent of the chemotaxis. Moreover, under suitable hypotheses on the coefficients of the reaction terms, we obtain explicit range for the chemotaxis sensitivity coefficients ensuring c∗=c0∗, which implies that the minimum …

Identification Of Novel And Rare Variants Associated With Handgrip Strength Using Whole Genome Sequence Data From The Nhlbi Trans-Omics In Precision Medicine (Topmed) Program, Chloé Sarnowski, Han Chen, Mary L. Biggs, Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Jan Bressler, Marguerite R. Irvin, Kathleen A. Ryan, David Karasik, Donna K. Arnett, L. Adrienne Cupples, David W. Fardo, Stephanie M. Gogarten, Benjamin D. Heavner, Deepti Jain, Hyun Min Kang, Charles Kooperberg, Arch G. Mainous, Braxton D. Mitchell, Alanna C. Morrison, Jeffrey R. O'Connell

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Handgrip strength is a widely used measure of muscle strength and a predictor of a range of morbidities including cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality. Previous genome-wide association studies of handgrip strength have focused on common variants primarily in persons of European descent. We aimed to identify rare and ancestry-specific genetic variants associated with handgrip strength by conducting whole-genome sequence association analyses using 13,552 participants from six studies representing diverse population groups from the Trans-Omics in Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Program. By leveraging multiple handgrip strength measures performed in study participants over time, we increased our effective sample size by 7-12%. Single-variant …

On The Use Of Minimum Penalties In Statistical Learning, Ben Sherwood, Bradley S. Price

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Modern multivariate machine learning and statistical methodologies estimate parameters of interest while leveraging prior knowledge of the association between outcome variables. The methods that do allow for estimation of relationships do so typically through an error covariance matrix in multivariate regression which does not scale to other types of models. In this article we proposed the MinPEN framework to simultaneously estimate regression coefficients associated with the multivariate regression model and the relationships between outcome variables using mild assumptions. The MinPen framework utilizes a novel penalty based on the minimum function to exploit detected relationships between responses. An iterative algorithm that …

Mental Health Services Provision In Primary Care And Emergency Department Settings: Analysis Of Blended Fee-For-Service And Blended Capitation Models In Ontario, Canada., Thyna Vu, Kelly K Anderson, Nibene H Somé, Amardeep Thind, Sisira Sarma

Epidemiology and Biostatistics Publications

Treating mental illnesses in primary care is increasingly emphasized to improve access to mental health services. Although family physicians (FPs) or general practitioners are in an ideal position to provide the bulk of mental health care, it is unclear how best to remunerate FPs for the adequate provision of mental health services. We examined the quantity of mental health services provided in Ontario's blended fee-for-service and blended capitation models. We evaluated the impact of FPs switching from blended fee-for-service to blended capitation on the provision of mental health services in primary care and emergency department using longitudinal health administrative data …

Knowledge Discovery From Complex Event Time Data With Covariates, Samira Karimi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In particular engineering applications, such as reliability engineering, complex types of data are encountered which require novel methods of statistical analysis. Handling covariates properly while managing the missing values is a challenging task. These type of issues happen frequently in reliability data analysis. Specifically, accelerated life testing (ALT) data are usually conducted by exposing test units of a product to severer-than-normal conditions to expedite the failure process. The resulting lifetime and/or censoring data are often modeled by a probability distribution along with a life-stress relationship. However, if the probability distribution and life-stress relationship selected cannot adequately describe the underlying failure …

A Comparison Of Spatial Clustering Assessment Methods, Nadeesha Dilhani Vidanapathirana

Theses and Dissertations

Spatial clustering detection methods are widely used in many fields of research including sociology, epidemiology, ecology, and criminology. The objective of this study is to assess the performance of four spatial clustering detection methods: the average nearest neighbor ratio, Ripley’s K function, local Moran’s I and Getis-Ord Gi* statistics. We conduct a simulation study to evaluate the performance of each method for areal data under different types of spatial dependence and three different areal structures; a 20x20 regular grid, United States counties in six states and Canadian forward sortation areas (FSAs) in three provinces. The results shows that the empirical …

Accurate And Integrative Detection Of Copy Number Variants With High-Throughput Data, Xizhi Luo

Theses and Dissertations

Copy number variation, as a major source of genetic variation in the human genome, are gains or losses of the DNA segments. Copy number variation has gained considerable interest as it plays important roles in human complex diseases. Therefore, accurate detection of CNVs with data generated by modern genotyping technologies, such as SNP array and whole-exome sequencing (WES), comprises a critical step toward a better understanding of disease etiology. However, current statistical methodologies for CNV detection still face analytical challenges due to numerous genetic and technological factors that may lead to spurious findings. First, existing methods assume the independent observations …

Regression Methods For Group Testing Data, Michael Stutz

Theses and Dissertations

Group testing is an efficient method of disease screening, whereby individual specimens (e.g., blood, urine, etc.) are pooled together and tested as a whole for the presence of disease. A common goal is to use data arising from these testing protocols to better understand the relationship between disease status and potential risk factors (e.g., age, symptom status, etc.). Numerous statistical methodologies have been developed for this purpose, most of which are built within the framework of a generalized linear model. Recent authors have suggested the inadequacy of such regression methods to capture the true functional relationships when nonlinear effects are …

Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Assisted Data Analytics, Wei Bao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays industries are collecting a massive and exponentially growing amount of data that can be utilized to extract useful insights for improving various aspects of our life. Data analytics (e.g., via the use of machine learning) has been extensively applied to make important decisions in various real world applications. However, it is challenging for resource-limited clients to analyze their data in an efficient way when its scale is large. Additionally, the data resources are increasingly distributed among different owners. Nonetheless, users' data may contain private information that needs to be protected.

Cloud computing has become more and more popular in …

An Integrated Magneto-Electrochemical Device For The Rapid Profiling Of Tumour Extracellular Vesicles From Blood Plasma, Jongmin Park, Jun Seok Park, Chen Han Huang, Ala Jo, Kaitlyn Cook, Rui Wang, Hsing Ying Lin, Jan Van Deun, Huiyan Li, Jouha Min, Lan Wang, Ghilsuk Yoon, Bob S. Carter, Leonora Balaj, Gyu Seog Choi, Cesar M. Castro, Ralph Weissleder, Hakho Lee

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Assays for cancer diagnosis via the analysis of biomarkers on circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs) typically have lengthy sample workups, limited throughput or insufficient sensitivity, or do not use clinically validated biomarkers. Here we report the development and performance of a 96-well assay that integrates the enrichment of EVs by antibody-coated magnetic beads and the electrochemical detection, in less than one hour of total assay time, of EV-bound proteins after enzymatic amplification. By using the assay with a combination of antibodies for clinically relevant tumour biomarkers (EGFR, EpCAM, CD24 and GPA33) of colorectal cancer (CRC), we classified plasma samples from 102 …

Statistical Modeling Of Daily Confirmed Covid-19 Cases And Deaths In Europe And United States, Zerui Zhang

Master's Theses (2009 -)

A novel coronavirus disease was first discovered in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. This new coronavirus named COVID-19 has rapidly spread and become a global threat affecting almost all the countries in the world. Therefore, it is important to know the trend of coronavirus disease to mitigate its effects. A good prediction model is crucial for the health care system to understand the trend of the COVID-19. This study aims to construct a good prediction model. Firstly, we detect change points of the time series data of daily confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19 in the United States and Europe, …

Lab Exercises For Statistics Using Excel, Julia Nebia, Steven Cosares, Milena Cuellar

Open Educational Resources

This document contains the text associated with a series of computer-based lab exercises to help students apply the concepts usually included in a first course in Statistics. A compressed file has been included that contains a separate folder for each lab. In each folder is an excel spreadsheet file and an editable word document providing the instructions for students to complete the exercise. The exercises are not numbered in the folders, so you can select any subset of these exercises to assign to your students. You are free to modify the instructions in any way you see fit, e.g., to …