Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

To Adopt Blockchain Technology Or Not: Is The Decision-Making Process Immune To Covid-19?, Rebecca Jauch

Thinking Matters Symposium

Blockchain technology has been shown to have advantages in improving the effectiveness of supply chain management. We use the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework with Threat-Rigidity Theory (TRT) to determine the factors that lead U.S. businesses to adopt blockchain technology, the factors that act as barriers to adoption, and the disruptive effect of COVID-19 on the rate of blockchain adoption

The Biggest Loser: How Tanking In Professional Sports Impacts Fan Perception, Julia Ayres

Honors Projects in Mathematics

Professional sports teams are adored nationwide for their talents and the pride they bring to their city for their efforts. However, not all teams take this responsibility seriously and will lose on purpose, or tank, to gain a higher draft pick in the future. Although the long-term goals of tanking are to help the organization, many people take issue with athletes not putting in their best efforts in every game. Teams in both the NBA and NFL are guilty of tanking to gain better draft picks but not all have found success in this process. This leads to important questions …

Analytical Study To Determine Significant Causes Of Increased No-Hitters In The 2021 Major League Baseball Season, Joel Robison

Honors Projects

Why were there so many no-hitters in the 2021 MLB season? This project focuses on possible significant causes to the record-breaking number of no-hitters pitched in the 2021 Major League Baseball season. Specifically, this project takes an analytical look at the recent trends in launch angles and spin rates to determine if there are any significant causes to the increased number of no-hitters in baseball. The random nature and unpredictability of the game of baseball make it almost impossible to come to any solid conclusions.

Examining Bacteriophage Reliance On The Tola Protein Of Escherichia Coli, Ellen Davis

Honors Projects

With the ever-growing crisis of antibiotic resistant bacteria, bacteriophage provide an important potential alternative therapy to treat infections when antibiotics are ineffective. For this reason, it is important to understand the mechanisms bacteriophage use to enter their bacterial host cell. The cellular envelope of the gram-negative bacterium E. coli contains a protein system known as Tol-Pal, which utilizes energy from the Proton Motive Force to carry out several cellular functions, including some associated with cellular division and outer-membrane stability. Certain bacteriophage take advantage of the energy produced by this system to cross the bacterial cell membrane. One important protein of …

A Novel Nonparametric Test For Heterogeneity Detection And Assessment Of Fluid Removal Among Crrt Patients In Icu, Shaowli Kabir

Theses and Dissertations--Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Over the past decade acute kidney injury (AKI) has been occurring among 20%-50% of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) in United States. Continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) has become a popular treatment method among these critically ill patients. But there are multiple complications in implementing this treatment, including discrepancies in practiced and prescribed fluid removal, possibly related to the heterogeneity among these patients. With mixture modeling there have been several techniques in detecting heterogeneity with their specific limitations. In this dissertation a novel nonparametric ‘d test’ will be used to detect heterogeneity among CRRT patients in ICU. …

An Educator’S Perspective Of The Tidyverse, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Johanna Hardin, Benjamin Baumer, Amelia Mcnamara, Nicholas J. Horton, Colin W. Rundel

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Computing makes up a large and growing component of data science and statistics courses. Many of those courses, especially when taught by faculty who are statisticians by training, teach R as the programming language. A number of instructors have opted to build much of their teaching around use of the tidyverse. The tidyverse, in the words of its developers, “is a collection of R packages that share a high-level design philosophy and low-level grammar and data structures, so that learning one package makes it easier to learn the next” (Wickham et al. 2019). These shared principles have led to the …

Early-Warning Alert Systems For Financial-Instability Detection: An Hmm-Driven Approach, Xing Gu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Regulators’ early intervention is crucial when the financial system is experiencing difficulties. Financial stability must be preserved to avert banks’ bailouts, which hugely drain government's financial resources. Detecting in advance periods of financial crisis entails the development and customisation of accurate and robust quantitative techniques. The goal of this thesis is to construct automated systems via the interplay of various mathematical and statistical methodologies to signal financial instability episodes in the near-term horizon. These signal alerts could provide regulatory bodies with the capacity to initiate appropriate response that will thwart or at least minimise the occurrence of a financial crisis. …

Efficient Low Dimensional Representation Of Vector Gaussian Distributions, Md Mahmudul Hasan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to find optimal graphical tree model for low dimensional representation of vector Gaussian distributions. For a special case we assumed that the population co-variance matrix $\Sigma_x$ has an additional latent graphical constraint, namely, a latent star topology. We have found the Constrained Minimum Determinant Factor Analysis (CMDFA) and Constrained Minimum Trace Factor Analysis (CMTFA) decompositions of this special $\Sigma_x$ in connection with the operational meanings of the respective solutions. Characterizing the CMDFA solution of special $\Sigma_x$, according to the second interpretation of Wyner's common information, is equivalent to solving the source coding problem of finding the minimum …

Vampires And Other Diseases: Stochastic Infection Dynamics Of Small Populations, Marijn Jaarsma

Honors Projects in Science and Technology

Mathematical models are powerful tools often applied in the field of epidemiology. The type and shape of the model will differ between different types of diseases. In this study, stochastic dynamical models are applied to the entertaining example of vampires, and the results of this analysis are compared to real-life diseases with small populations of infected. The data used comes from pop-culture depictions of vampires in literature, television shows, movies, and fan pages associated with these depictions. The aim of this study is to serve as an educational tool for modeling diseases with small populations to predict and control the …

Flexible Modelling Of Time-Dependent Covariate Effects With Correlated Competing Risks: Application To Hereditary Breast And Ovarian Cancer Families, Seungwoo Lee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to develop a flexible approach for modelling time-dependent covariate effects on event risk using B-splines in the presence of correlated competing risks. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated via simulation in terms of the bias and precision of the estimation of the parameters and penetrance functions. In addition, we extended the concordance index to account for time-dependent effects and competing events simultaneously and demonstrated its inference procedures. We applied our proposed methods to data rising from the BRCA1 mutation families from the breast cancer family registry to evaluate the time-dependent effects of mammographic screening and …

A Statistical Study Of Operating Systems At Harrisburg University, Dylan Morgan, Ethan Collins, Joshua Moody, Akeisha Belgrave

Harrisburg University Research Symposium: Highlighting Research, Innovation, & Creativity

We conducted a survey of 100 students to find out which operating system students are using for their main school laptop. (Class Project)

Percentage Of Yellow Sour Patch Kids, Easton Kratzer, Sarah Baxter

Harrisburg University Research Symposium: Highlighting Research, Innovation, & Creativity

After being given the Qualitative Research Project in Introduction to Statistics, I came up with the question asking what percentage of Sour Patch Kids are yellow. This resulted in me going through an entire bag and counting the amount of every color to figure out the percentages. (Class Project)

A Statistical Study Into The Relationship Between The Student Age And Their Academic Performance, Umangkumar Patel, Akeisha Belgrave

Harrisburg University Research Symposium: Highlighting Research, Innovation, & Creativity

This project will conduct a research in order to find out the relationship between the age of a student and their academic performance. This project will survey at least 100 students. (Class Project)

Favorite Programming Language Among Students, Anwar Jawhar, Akeisha Belgrave

Harrisburg University Research Symposium: Highlighting Research, Innovation, & Creativity

This project involves understanding the favorite programming language among students. I hypothesize that the favorite programming language will be Python. (Class Project)

Preference For Violence By Gender, Ayrton Hall, Christian Watson, Akeisha Belgrave

Harrisburg University Research Symposium: Highlighting Research, Innovation, & Creativity

In our survey we asked students of HU what their favorite video games were as well as their favorite genre and most played game. We then analyzed the data to see how gender affects preference for violent games. (Class Project)

Statistical Applications To The Management Of Intensive Care And Step-Down Units, Yawo Mamoua Kobara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes three contributing manuscripts related to patient flow management, server decision-making, and ventilation time in the intensive care and step-down units system.

First, a Markov decision process (MDP) model with a Monte Carlo simulation was performed to compare two patient flow policies: prioritizing premature step-down and prioritizing rejection of patients when the intensive care unit is congested. The optimal decisions were obtained under the two strategies. The simulation results based on these optimal decisions show that a premature step-down strategy contributes to higher congestion downstream. Counter-intuitively, premature step-down should be discouraged, and patient rejection or divergence actions should …

Impact Of Treatment Length On Individuals With Substance Use Disorders In Allegheny County, Cassie Dibenedetti, Kate Rosello

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

Auberle social services is opening the Family Healing Center (FHC), a level 3.5 treatment program in Pittsburgh, PA that provides housing and 24-hour support for families struggling with opioid addiction. We partnered with Auberle to study characteristics of individuals receiving level 3.5 treatment and to determine whether longer treatment lengths correlate with fewer adverse outcomes. We obtained data from the Allegheny County Department of Human Services on 2,016 individuals admitted to level 3.5 treatment in 2019. The data included birth year, race, gender, admittance date, discharge date, and Children Youth and Family (CYF) incidents before and after treatment. We categorized …

A Functional Optimization Approach To Stochastic Process Sampling, Ryan Matthew Thurman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of the current research project is the formulation of a method for the estimation and modeling of additive stochastic processes with both linear- and cycle-type trend components as well as a relatively robust noise component in the form of Levy processes. Most of the research in stochastic processes tends to focus on cases where the process is stationary, a condition that cannot be assumed for the model above due to the presence of the cyclical sub-component in the overall additive process. As such, we outline a number of relevant theoretical and applied topics, such as stochastic processes and …

Measurement Error Modeling Applied To Phylogenetic Inference And Parametric Bootstrap Approach To Multifactor Anova Models With Unequal Variances And Unbalanced Data, Sarah Katharine Alver

Mathematics & Statistics ETDs

This dissertation includes two main topics. The first uses measurement error modeling to improve upon an existing method of inferring species trees from gene trees that were estimated with error. The second involves extending the parametric bootstrap (PB) approach, which was previously shown to work well for one- and two-way analysis of variance models with unequal variance and unbalanced data (heteANOVA), to multi-factor heteANOVA models. An overall framework using PB is presented. For each topic, the underlying theory is shown, and simulations and applications to empirical data are presented, demonstrating improvement over earlier methods. The proposed species tree inference method …

Anticipating Stochastic Integrals And Related Linear Stochastic Differential Equations, Sudip Sinha

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Itô’s stochastic calculus revolutionized the field of stochastic analysis and has found numerous applications in a wide variety of disciplines. Itô’s theory, even though quite general, cannot handle anticipating stochastic processes as integrands. There have been considerable efforts within the mathematical community to extend Itô’s calculus to account for anticipation. The Ayed–Kuo integral — introduced in 2008 — is one of the most recent developments. It is arguably the most accessible among the theories extending Itô’s calculus — relying solely on probabilistic methods. In this dissertation, we look at the recent advances in this area, highlighting our contributions. First, we …

Machine Learning In Support Of Student Success, Rachel Rucker

Undergraduate Research Conference

Our goal is to predict whether a student will finish the semester on academic probation by mid-term using university data.

Molecular Characterization Of Rickettsial Agents In Ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) From Sri Lanka, Gregory A. Dasch, Marina Eremeeva, Maria L. Zambrano, Ranjan Premaratna, S. A. M. Kularatne

Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences Faculty Publications

Because the majority of spotted fever group rickettsiae are transmitted to humans by tick bites, it is important to understand which ticks might play a role in transmission of rickettsial pathogens in Sri Lanka. The purpose of our study was to conduct molecular surveillance of 847 ticks collected in different locations in central Sri Lanka to determine which were infected with Rickettsia and Anaplasmataceae. Molecular methods were used to identify the ticks and the agents detected. Most ticks (Amblyomma, Haemaphysalis, and Rhipicephalus) were collected by flagging, and lower number was collected from dogs, cattle, pigs, a …

White Noise Space Analysis And Multiplicative Change Of Measures, Daniel Alpay, Palle Jorgensen, Motke Porat

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper, we display a family of Gaussian processes, with explicit formulas and transforms. This is presented with the use of duality tools in such a way that the corresponding path-space measures are mutually singular. We make use of a corresponding family of representations of the canonical commutation relations (CCR) in an infinite number of degrees of freedom. A key feature of our construction is explicit formulas for associated transforms; these are infinite-dimensional analogs of Fourier transforms. Our framework is that of Gaussian Hilbert spaces, reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and Fock spaces. The latter forms the setting for our …

Eigenfunction Restriction Estimates For Curves With Nonvanishing Geodesic Curvatures In Compact Riemannian Surfaces With Nonpositive Sectional Curvatures, Chamsol Park

Mathematics & Statistics ETDs

For 2 ≤ p < 4, we study the Lp norms of restrictions of eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on smooth compact 2-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. Burq, G\´erard, and Tzvetkov [12], and Hu [21] found eigenfunction restriction estimates for a curve with nonvanishing geodesic curvatures. We will explain how the proof of the known estimates helps us to consider the case where the given smooth compact Riemannian manifold has nonpositive sectional curvatures. For p = 4, we will also obtain a logarithmic analogous estimate, by using arguments in Xi and Zhang [37], Sogge [33], and Bourgain [10]. At the end of this dissertation, we will talk about a future work, which is a follow up study for higher dimensional analogues of the above curve cases.

General Stochastic Calculus And Applications, Pujan Shrestha

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In 1942, K. Itô published his pioneering paper on stochastic integration with respect to Brownian motion. This work led to the framework for Itô calculus. Note that, Itô calculus is limited in working with knowledge from the future. There have been many generalizations of the stochastic integral in being able to do so. In 2008, W. Ayed and H.-H. Kuo introduced a new stochastic integral by splitting the integrand into the adaptive part and the counterpart called instantly independent. In this doctoral work, we conduct deeper research into the Ayed–Kuo stochastic integral and corresponding anticipating stochastic calculus.

We provide a …

Pro-Inflammatory Diet Pictured In Children With Atopic Dermatitis Or Food Allergy: Nutritional Data Of The Lina Cohort, Olivia Schütte, Larissa Bachmann, Nitin Shivappa Mbbs, Mph, Ph.D., James R. Hébert Scd, Janine F. Felix, Stefan Röder, Ulrich Sack, Michaek Borte, Wieland Kiess, Ana C. Zenclussen, Gabriele I. Stangl

Faculty Publications

Background: Lifestyle and environmental factors are known to contribute to allergic disease development, especially very early in life. However, the link between diet composition and allergic outcomes remains unclear. Methods: In the present population-based cohort study we evaluated the dietary intake of 10-year-old children and analyses were performed with particular focus on atopic dermatitis or food allergy, allergic diseases known to be affected by dietary allergens. Dietary intake was assessed via semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaires. Based on these data, individual nutrient intake as well as children’s Dietary Inflammatory Index (C-DII™) scores were calculated. Information about atopic manifestations during the first …

Intra-Hour Solar Forecasting Using Cloud Dynamics Features Extracted From Ground-Based Infrared Sky Images, Guillermo Terrén-Serrano

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Due to the increasing use of photovoltaic systems, power grids are vulnerable to the projection of shadows from moving clouds. An intra-hour solar forecast provides power grids with the capability of automatically controlling the dispatch of energy, reducing the additional cost for a guaranteed, reliable supply of energy (i.e., energy storage). This dissertation introduces a novel sky imager consisting of a long-wave radiometric infrared camera and a visible light camera with a fisheye lens. The imager is mounted on a solar tracker to maintain the Sun in the center of the images throughout the day, reducing the scattering effect produced …

Dietetic Intervention In Psoriatic Arthritis: The Dieta Trial, Beatriz F. Leite, Melissa A. Morimoto, Carina M. F. Gomes, Barbara N.C. Klemz, Patrícia S. Genaro, Nitin Shivappa Mbbs, Mph, Ph.D., James R. Hébert Scd, Nágila R.T. Damasceno, Marcelo M. Pinheiro

Faculty Publications

Aim To evaluate whether dietary pattern changes, antioxidant supplementation or 5-10% weight loss could improve disease activity (skin and joint) in patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA). Methods A total of 97 PsA patients were enrolled in this 12-week randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial. Patients were randomized into three groups: Diet-placebo (hypocaloric diet + placebo supplementation); Diet-fish (hypocaloric diet + 3 g/day of omega-3 supplementation; and Placebo. Food intake (3-day registry, Healthy Eating Index (HEI), and the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII)), body composition (whole-body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), weight and waist circumference) and disease activity (PASI, BSA, BASDAI, DAS28-ESR, DAS28-CRP and MDA) …

Factors That Influence Graduation Rates At Northwestern College, Hailey Louw, Jennifer Schon

Celebration of Research

This project examines factors that influence graduation rates regarding behaviors and choices made in college as opposed to exogenous factors such as family income, race, etc. These factors also included responses from first-year students who took the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) survey. Using data from 2013 - 2016 freshman admissions and combining this with CIRP responses from 2014 and 2016, there were found to be five factors related to behavior at college that influenced graduation rates.

Completion of registered hours, campus involvement, and high tuition discount rates had strong, positive correlations with whether the student graduated. Student participation in …

Women Enrollment At Northwestern College, Josiah Bonestroo, Jennifer Schon

Celebration of Research

This project observes the enrollment rate of women at Northwestern College and why it is inconsistent. Data is used from satisfaction surveys of 2020 and 2021 enrollees, with the data being analyzed using R Studio. Types of data observed include type of visits students went on, types of scholarships, and interest in a Christian college atmosphere.