Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Confidence Interval For The Mean Of A Beta Distribution, Sean Rangel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Statistical inference for the mean of a beta distribution has become increasingly popular in various fields of academic research. In this study, we developed a novel statistical model from likelihood-based techniques to evaluate various confidence interval techniques for the mean of a beta distribution. Simulation studies will be implemented to compare the performance of the confidence intervals. In addition to the development and study involving confidence intervals, we will also apply the confidence intervals to real biological data that was gathered by the Department of Biology at Stephen F. Austin State University and provide recommendations on the best practice.

Detailed Structural And Stratigraphic Analysis Of The Salt-Sediment Interactions On Top Of The Wheeler Dome Salt Tongue, Mississippi Canyon Area, Gulf Of Mexico, Ryan Jaska

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Mississippi Canyon is in the northeastern part of the Gulf of Mexico, south of the state of Mississippi. In this area, there are many different salt structures present including salt canopies, diapirs, and salt pillows. The Callovian aged Louann Salt covers this area and is the cause of many of the salt structures and structures of the overlying formations seen in Gulf of Mexico today. Salt is mobile when subjected to stress from overlying sediment and gravity. Stress will force the salt to not only move upward, but to also move down slope deeper into adjacent basins through the …

Numerical Modeling Of Controlling Factors For Formation Of Unconformity-Related Uranium Deposits In Sedimentary Basins, Jiayue Shen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unconformity-related uranium (URU) deposits are the most profitable uranium deposits in the world. Among those deposits, the Athabasca Basin hosts the world’s largest high-grade uranium deposits. A series of numerical experiments regarding the effect of uranium source location, fault location, and fault dip angle on the formation of URU deposits have been conducted by using software TOUHREACT.

Simulation results suggest that although both sandstone-sourced and basement-sourced models can generate economical deposits, basement-sourced models are more likely to form larger deposits since uranium-carrying fluid only needs to move a shorter distance to reach the structural trap for further ore forming reaction. …

Emergency Evaluation In Connected And Automated Vehicles, Elvin Eziama

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An intelligent transportation system (ITS) provides improved transport efficiency and safety based on vehicle communication. Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) as part of an ITS are projected to revolutionize the transportation industry, primarily by allowing real-time and seamless information exchange between vehicles and roadside infrastructure. Although these CAVs are expected to offer vast benefits, new problems in terms of safety, security, and privacy will also emerge. Since CAVs continue to rely heavily on vehicle sensors and information obtained from other vehicles and roadside units, abnormal sensors and malicious cyber attacks can lead to destructive results and fatal crashes. Therefore, ensuring …

Approaches For Eye-Tracking While Reading, Xiaohao Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we developed an algorithm to detect the correct line being read by participants. The comparisons of the reading line classification algorithms are demonstrated using eye-tracking data collected from a realistic reading experiment in front of a low-cost desktop-mounted eye-tracker. With the development of eye-tracking techniques, research begins to aim at trying to understand information from the eyes. However, state of the art in eye-tracking applications is affected by a large amount of measurement noise. Even the expensive eye-trackers still suffer significant noise. In addition, the inherent characteristics of gaze movement increase the difficulty of obtaining valuable information …

Active Community Opinion Network Mining And Maximization Through Social Networks Posts, Mayank Semwal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Existing OM systems like CONE take a partial historical rating of users on multiple products and perform opinion estimation to maximizes overall positive opinions using OM. However, CONE does not consider actual user opinions from social posts where users provide opinions through comments, likes and sharing about a product. OBIN mines users' low-frequency features from comments to create a community preference influence network utilizing user response on posts and relationships between them. However, OBIN only performs feature-level opinion mining and does not consider a joint approach that combines sentence-level and feature-level to remove subjective reviews and includes slang words and …

Physiological State Determinants Of Maternal Cortisol Signaling And Its Impact On Offspring Quality And Fitness, Sydney Currier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assessing the intergenerational effects of maternal stress is important for predicting how offspring will respond to changing environments. The overall aim of my thesis was to quantify the effects of maternal state on maternally derived egg cortisol and determine whether this variation in egg cortisol impacts Chinook salmon offspring performance and fitness in a sex-specific way. I quantified within-female changes in maternal energetics and reproductive metrics that I linked to egg quality and ultimately embryo survival. I found egg cortisol increases with increasing maternal plasma cortisol, and increases further as plasma cortisol levels rise with each day that eggs are …

Deep Learning Applications In Medical Bioinformatics, Ziad Omar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After a patient’s breast cancer diagnosis, identifying breast cancer lymph node metastases is one of the most important and critical factor that is directly related to the patient’s survival. The traditional way to examine the existence of cancer cells in the breast lymph nodes is through a lymph node procedure, biopsy. The procedure process is time-consuming for the patient and the provider, costly, and lacks accuracy as not every lymph node is examined. The intent of this study is to develop an artificial neural network (ANNs) that would map genetic biomarkers to breast lymph node classes using ANNs. The neural …

Improved Glove Word Embedding Using Linear Weighting Scheme For Word Similarity Tasks, Qinglan Lu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the trends in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the use of word embedding. Its aim is to build a low dimensional vector representation of words from text corpora. Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) and Sikp-Gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS) are two representative word embedding methods. Existing papers have different conclusions on the performance of these two methods. This thesis focuses on GloVe and studies its commonalities and differences with SGNS.

Word co-occurrence is the cornerstone of all word embedding algorithms. One difference between GloVe and SGNS is the definition of co-occurrence. The weight of co-occurring words tapers …

Gamification Platform For Social Engineering Training And Awareness, Rui Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Almost every type of cybersecurity incident leverages one or more social engineering attacks. Nowadays social engineering attack is considered one of the most significant threats to individuals and organizations. It is an attacking technique that manipulates and deceives users to access or gain privileged information. Cybersecurity training is an effective defense method to enhance people's awareness of social engineering attacks, especially training through game playing or educational games. However, fewer tools can customize social engineering simulations based on user's characteristics and needs. Some social engineering training tools are lack motivation, engagement, and interaction.

Gamification is the use of game elements …

Reaction Wheels Fault Isolation Onboard 3-Axis Controlled Satellite Using Enhanced Random Forest With Multidomain Features, Mofiyinoluwa Oluwatobi Folami

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing number of satellite launches throughout the years, it is only natural that an interest in the safety and monitoring of these systems would increase as well. However, as a system becomes more complex it becomes difficult to generate a high-fidelity model that accurately describes all the system components. With such constraints using data-driven approaches becomes a more feasible option. One of the most commonly used actuators in spacecraft is known as the reaction wheel. If these reaction wheels are not maintained or monitored, it could result in mission failure and unwarranted costs. That is why fault detection …

Mining Twitter Sequences Of Product Opinions With Multi-Word Aspect Terms, Vinay Kiran Manjunath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social media platforms have opened doors to users' opinions and perceptions. The text remains the most popular means of contact on social media, despite different means of communication (audio/video and images). Twitter is one such microblogging platform that allows people to express their thoughts within 280 characters per message. The freedom of expression has made it difficult to understand the polarity (Positive, Negative, or Neutral) of the tweets/posts. Given a corpus of microblog texts (e.g., "the new iPhone battery life is good, but camera quality is bad"), mining aspects (e.g., battery life, camera quality) and opinions (e.g., good, bad) of …

A Network-Based Approach For Computational Drug Repurposing On Cancer Data, Ann Reba, Thomas Alexander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we are interested in finding the best drugs that can be repurposed for the disease and able to find the adverse effects such drugs that are FDA-Approved. Developing an effective drug can be a time-consuming and expensive crucible method. Network-based machine learning methods are used for predicting a given drug for A that can be used for B. It aims at finding new indications for already existing drugs and therefore increases the available therapeutic choices at a fraction of the cost of new drug development. The perturbation gene expression data corresponding to the MCF7 cell line was …

Transferability Of Intrusion Detection Systems Using Machine Learning Between Networks, William Peter Mati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) using machine learning is a next generation tool to strengthen the cyber security of networks. Such systems possess the potential to detect zero-day attacks, attacks that are unknown to researchers and are occurring for the first time in history. This thesis tackles novel ideas in this research domain and solves foreseeable issues of a practical deployment of such tool.

The main issue addressed in this thesis are situations where an entity intends to implement an IDS using machine learning onto their network, but do not have attack data available from their own network to train the …

Hrotate: Hybrid Relational Rotation Embedding For Knowledge Graph, Akshay Mukundbhai Shah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Knowledge Graph (KG) represents the real world's information in the form of triplets (head, relation, and tail). However, most KGs are generated manually or semi-automatically, which resulted in an enormous number of missing information in a KG. The goal of a Knowledge-Graph Completion task is to predict missing links in a given Knowledge Graph. Various approaches exist to predict a missing link in a KG. However, the most prominent approaches are based on tensor factorization and Knowledge-Graph embeddings, such as RotatE and SimplE. The RotatE model depicts each relation as a rotation from the source entity (Head) to the target …

An Enhancement To Cnn Approach With Synthesized Image Data For Disease Subtype Classification, Narider Pal Singh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The introduction of genetic testing has profoundly enhanced the prospects of early detection of diseases and techniques to suggest precision medicines. The subtyping of critical diseases has proven to be an essential part of the development of individualized therapies and has led to deeper insights into the heterogeneity of the disease. Studies suggest that variants in particular genes have significant effects on certain types of immune system cells and are also involved in the risk of certain critical illnesses like cancer. By analyzing the genetic sequence of a patient, disease types and subtypes can be predicted. Recent research work has …

Experimental Study Of Evolving Communities In Online Social Networks, Pallavi Kaul

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the past few decades, the advancement in technology and the internet has leveraged the application of social networks in the world. Millions of people connect through social networks irrespective of their geographical boundaries. These users tend to form communities on common ground, such as similar hobbies, school, work, and much more. Deep level mining and analysis of these communities, connections within these communities, and the connections within the users of these communities divulge abundant data about the underlying features of these complex networks. This thesis focuses on detecting communities at specific times to track the change in memberships. Doing …

Population Genetic Analyses Of Arctic Char (Salvelinus Alpinus) Life History Types In Nettilling Lake & Amadjuak River Ecosystem: A Test Of Reproductive Isolation, Chen Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A great number of studies have identified strong genetic differences between sympatric anadromous and resident populations of Salmonidae. However, Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) migratory phenotypes in the Nettilling Lake and Amadjuak River ecosystem in Nunavut, Canada have not been genetically characterized, and it remains unclear if distinct genotypes and phenotypes associated with migratory life history differences are maintained through reproductive isolation, and they have been assumed to be sympatric populations, or co-occurring populations. Co-occurring Arctic char (n=225) were sampled from eleven sites along the Amadjuak River in 2014 and 2015. Twelve microsatellite loci were used to quantify genetic variation among …

Assessing The Adaptive Capacity Of An Arctic Seabird To Increasing Frequency In Predation Risk From Polar Bears Using Behavioural And Physiological Metrics, Erica Anne Geldart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Predator-prey dynamics in the Arctic are being altered with changing sea-ice phenology. The increasing frequency of predation on colonial nesting seabird eggs by a rare predator - the polar bear (Ursus maritimus), is a consequence of bears shifting to terrestrial food resources through a shortened seal-hunting season. I study a colony of nesting common eiders (Somateria mollissima) on Mitivik (East Bay) Island, Nunavut, Canada, that is exposed to established nest predators such as arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), but has recently experienced an increase in polar bear nest predation due to the bears’ lost on-ice hunting opportunities. Given eiders’ limited eco-evolutionary …

Discovering High-Profit Product Feature Groups By Mining High Utility Sequential Patterns From Feature-Based Opinions, Priyanka Motwani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Extracting a group of features together instead of a single feature from the mined opinions, such as “{battery, camera, design} of a smartphone,” may yield higher profit to the manufactures and higher customer satisfaction, and these can be called High Profit Feature Groups (HPFG). The accuracy of Opinion-Feature Extraction can be improved if more complex sequential patterns of customer reviews are learned and included in the user-behavior analysis to obtain relevant frequent feature groups. Existing Opinion-Feature Extraction systems that use Data Mining techniques with some sequences include those referred to in this thesis as Rashid13OFExt, Rana18OFExt, and HPFG19_HU. Rashid13OFExt …

Transmission Data Rate Control Based Mechanism For Congestion Control In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (Vanet), Srihari Jayachandran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) supporting Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (v2I) communication can increase the efficiency and safety of the road transportation systems. VANET typically uses wireless communication technology and in scenarios with high vehicle densities, the communication channel faces congestion, negatively impacting the reliability of the safety applications. To prevent this, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) has proposed the Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) methodology to effectively control the channel load, by controlling various message transmission parameters like message rate, data rate, and transmission power. Currently, most research works focus on the transmission power to control congestion, while the …

Cluster Hire In Social Networks Using Modified Weighted Structural Clustering Algorithm For Networks (Mwscan), Harshil Patal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concept of effective collaboration within a group is immensely used in organizations as a viable means for improving team performance. Any organization or prominent institute, who works with multiple projects needs to hire a group of experts who can complete a set of projects. When hiring a group of experts, numerous considerations must be taken into account. In the Cluster Hire problem, we are given a set of experts, each having a set of skills. Also, we are given a set of projects, each requiring a set of skills. Upon completion of each project, a profit is generated for …

Computational Enzymology On Sulfur-Containing Enzymes: From Method To Application, Paul Meister

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sulfur-containing biomolecules display incredible functional diversity. Indeed, in addition to thiols and thioethers, S-nitrosothiols, 3,4-coordinate, sulfoxides, persulfides and now even polysulfides are commonly observed intermediates. Unfortunately, however, their biological synthesis and roles remain poorly understood. In addition, sulfur-containing species can access a broad range of oxidation states and thus can act as either an electrophile or nucleophile giving rise to an even more diverse set of sulfur-derived functional groups. However, these unique properties can lead to difficulties in characterizing such compounds experimentally and reinforces the need for computational studies to reliably predict their structural and energetic properties. In this dissertation, …

Comparative Study Of Reinforcement Learning Methods In Path Planning, Daniel Obawole

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In order to perform a large variety of tasks and achieve human-level performance in complex real-world environments, an intelligent agent must be able to learn from its dynamically changing environment. Generally speaking, agents have limitations in obtaining an accurate description of the environment from what they perceive because they may not have all the information about the environment. The present research is focused on reinforcement learning algorithms that represent a defined category in the field of machine learning because of their unique approach based on a trial-error basis. Reinforcement learning is used to solve control problems based on received rewards. …

Cluster Hire In Social Networks Using Modified Weighted Structural Clustering Algorithm For Networks (Mwscan), Harshil Patel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concept of effective collaboration within a group is immensely used in organizations as a viable means for improving team performance. Any organization or prominent institute, who works with multiple projects needs to hire a group of experts who can complete a set of projects. When hiring a group of experts, numerous considerations must be taken into account. In the Cluster Hire problem, we are given a set of experts, each having a set of skills. Also, we are given a set of projects, each requiring a set of skills. Upon completion of each project, a profit is generated for …

The Development And Application Of Targeted Edna Metabarcoding For Monitoring Freshwater And Marine Ais, Yueyang Wu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Species invasions are of critical concern due to their significant impacts on ecosystems and social economies, of which aquatic invasive species (AIS) often pose significant challenges in their control and management, notably because of difficulties in early detection. Environmental DNA (eDNA) provides a promising tool in advancing the detection of newly introduced aquatic organisms because of its high sensitivity and ease of use compared to traditional capture-based methods. Although eDNA-based methods are increasingly used worldwide, especially in aquatic ecosystems, most studies focus on a limited number of target species despite a pressing need for broad taxonomic monitoring for conservation and …

Meta-Heuristic Approach For Course Scheduling Problem, Amanta Sunny

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, much research is being carried out to find efficient algorithms for optimal automated university course timetable problems (UCTP). UCTP allocates the university's events like lectures, exams to the various resources, including instructors, students, lecture time and classrooms. Class scheduling is one of the biggest challenging problems of educational institutions. In this thesis, the aim is to improve the state-of-art for a class scheduling problem considering some hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints must be satisfied. Soft constraints need not be satisfied, but there is a penalty for each soft constraint violation. We also have a timing penalty for scheduling …

Neural Network Based Approach For Detecting Location Spoofing In Vehicular Communication, Smarth Kukreja

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an evolving subset of MANET. It's deployed on the roads, where vehicles act as mobile nodes. Active security and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are integral applications of VANET, which require stable and uninterrupted vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology. VANET, is a type of wireless network, due to which it is quite prone to security attacks. Extremely dynamic connections, sensitive data sharing and time-sensitivity of this network make it a vulnerable to security attacks. The messages shared between the vehicles are the basic safety message (BSM), these messages are broadcasted by each vehicle in the network to …

A Study Of Some Transportation Networks From A Complex Network Perspective Chakrabarthy, Pooja., Pooja Chakrabarthy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Complex networks are ubiquitous; consider, for example, road networks, protein-protein interaction networks, metabolic networks, power networks etc. They can be applied to a wide range of areas like mathematics, computer science, social, and biological sciences. Random graphs can aid in observing the topological features in various data sources and give insights on their respective real-world networks. In this thesis, we study the particular case of small-world networks and compare them with random and regular networks. We start by explaining the complexity of networks and how graph theory can be applied to complex networks to understand their topological properties. Using which, …

Multifaceted Environmental Enrichment In Industrial Fish Hatcheries: The Influence Of Enriched Rearing On The In-Situ Behaviour And Post-Stocking Success Of Juvenile Atlantic Salmon (Salmo Salar), Justine Elizabeth Mcandrews

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hatchery fish reared and stocked to sustain or restore wild populations often perform poorly in novel environments compared to their wild counterparts. To combat maladaptive hatchery-acquired traits environmental enrichment is an emerging tool used to provide ‘life skills training’ to hatchery fish prior to release. Through the application of simple yet multifaceted enrichment protocols in an industrial fish hatchery, this thesis aimed to demonstrate how enrichment could be applied to improve the ecological viability of stocked fish. At a provincially-run fish hatchery, a subgroup of juvenile Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) were subject to 10 weeks of environmental enrichment …