Student dropout is a problem that educational researchers have been concerned about for years. Much attention has been directed towards first-time freshman, who are particularly vulnerable at the beginning of their academic careers according to historical research data. Therefo…
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My dissertation consists of three essays on empirical economic growth. Chapters I and II reconsider the current practice of cross-country growth regressions. Chapter III focuses on the emerging market crises and economic growth. In the face of persisting income inequalities acro…
In clinical and preclinical studies it is common to observe correlated responses. Procedures for analysis of data from such studies include the use of generalized estimating equations, generalized mixed effects models and hierarchical modeling. George and Bowman (1995) propose a…
In this dissertation, we design a system for time-critical decision making using communication. In addition, we present the design and implementation of a multiagent environment (MAE), in which this time-critical decision making system works. The complexity of today's workplace …
State-space modelling is a powerful tool to study ecological systems. The direct inclusion of uncertainty, unification of models and data, and ability to model unobserved, hidden states increases our knowledge about the environment and provides new ecological insights. I extend …
In this thesis we consider some finite mixture time series models in which each component is following a well-known process, e.g. AR, ARMA or ARMA-GARCH process, with either normal-type errors or Student-t type errors. We develop MCMC methods and use them in the Bayesian analysi…
Towards having a one size fits all solution to cocaine detection at borders; this thesis proposes a systematic cocaine detection methodology that can use raw data output from a fibre optic sensor to produce a set of unique features whose decisions can be combined to lead to reli…
This political methodology dissertation consists of several distinct essays that apply three new estimation techniques to all three subfields of the discipline—international relations, American politics and Comparative politics. The first is an application of reversible jump Mar…
Historically, decision-makers have used expert opinion to supplement lack of data. Expert opinion, however, is applied with much caution. This is because judgment is subjective and contains estimation error with some degree of uncertainty. The purpose of this study is to quantif…
This dissertation consists of two essays which carry out an empirical analysis of import protection barriers and regional trade agreements. In the first essay I seek to estimate an empirical model pertaining to the formation of non-tariff barriers. The model integrates several e…
How should our beliefs change over time? The standard answer to this question is the Bayesian one. But while the Bayesian account works well with respect to beliefs about the world, it breaks down when applied to self-locating or de se beliefs. In this work I explore ways to ext…
Forecasting in international relations is becoming increasingly common, accurate, and relevant for decision support to policymakers. One of the major subjects of forecasting has been inter- and intrastate war, through various observable outcomes like onset, duration, and casualt…
In 2015, Illinois changed size and harvest limits for catfishes (blue catfish Ictalurus furcatus, flathead catfish Pylodictis olivaris, and channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus) in the Ohio River to match those of neighboring states in order to provide continuity of the regulatio…
Site search is usually not as advanced as the global search engine and suffers from a few problems such as lack of algorithm transparency and maintenance capability. Also, site search is challenged by the reality that data set are significantly smaller, with fewer searches and m…
As the earth's climate rapidly changes, it remains unclear how populations will respond to novel systems and anthropogenic inputs to said systems. The development of new applied conservation tools will be critical to the implementation of solutions to novel problems. My disserta…
In prediction modeling and causality, one of the main goals is to build an algorithm that best represents a dataset. This process first involves the task of selecting features that would best describe the response variable. This paper aims to address the issue of feature selecti…