Probabilistic models are often used in practice to represent and reason about uncertainty. A key reasoning task over them is finding the most probable assignment to all the unobserved variables given observations. This task called the most probable explanation (MPE) task has sev…
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The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a quantum mechanical model of N Majorana fermions with all-to-all interactions. The SYK model has historical roots in both nuclear physics and condensed matter physics, and has recently drawn much attention due to its newly discovered role as…
Time series analysis is essential for a wide range of fields, ranging from business intelligence to healthcare. Among various time series data, two representative types of time series are temporally-ordered wearable sensory data (e.g., heart rate) and human behavioral data (e.g.…
Landslides are among the most common and damaging natural hazards on earth. Policy makers, land use planners, and community members need to know not only when and where landslides are likely to occur (hazard) but also the consequences on the human-built environment (risk). Exist…
I study how attitudes towards risk and risky behavior adapt over the long-run to changes in risk in individuals' environments. In the first chapter I build a dynamic model of choice in which agents' endogenous foreground risk-taking adapts to evolving beliefs about exogenous bac…
System testing is very time-consuming and costly, especially for complex high-cost and high-reliability systems. For this reason, the number of failures needed for the developmental phase of system testing should be relatively small in general. To assess the reliability growth o…
Infrastructure plays an all-pervasive role in any given society.As such, financing of infrastructure project is expected to yield positive externality on economic growth and improvement in the quality of life. Nigeria is not an exception in this regard. In view of this importanc…
Achieving state wildlife agency biological goals for deer (Odocoileus spp.) and turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) rely on high quality data collection via hunter harvest surveys. Concomitantly, better information is needed to optimize best survey methods. From 2017 to 2019, we survey…
Due to the variety of tools available to control atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) systems, they provide a versatile platform for studying many-body physics, quantum simulation, and quantum computation. Although extensive efforts are employed to reduce coupling between the sy…
The study of open physical systems concerns finding ways to incorporate the lack of information about the environment into a theory that best describes the behavior of the system. We consider characterizing the environment by using the system as a sensor, mitigating errors, and …
Complex networks can be observed in many areas ranging from ecological and biological to technical systems. Complex systems have many interacting components which make their dynamics non-linear. This makes it difficult to calculate important properties of the system such as resi…
This study aims to analyse the behaviour of crude oil prices and to determine the dynamic relationships between domestic crude oil prices and fundamental macroeconomic variables in Libya and Nigeria. The analysis in this study involves two stages. The first stage is to analyse a…
This dissertation seeks to provide solutions to the puzzle of why we see variance in candidate selection systems at the state level across states, between parties in the same state, and within parties over time. Further, it aims to answer the research question of whether parties…
We consider change-point detection and estimation in two different settings. The objective is to halt a process when the process generating observations deviates from a specified in control standard, in which case the process is referred to as out of control. We propose a Bayesi…
This thesis investigates the possible relationship between the archaeological presence of maize, in the United States, and historical environmental variables, rainfall and temperature, in addition to the number of underground plants that store energy and nutrients, in a given ar…
Random matrix theory has a long history. It was first introduced in mathematical statistics by John Wishart in 1928, and it gained attention during the 1950s due to work by Eugene Wigner studying the distribution of nuclear energy levels. A large number of physicists and mathema…
In this Thesis, I explore transiting exoplanets: what we can learn from modeling their light curves, and what we can learn from their arrangement in planetary systems. I begin in Chapter 1 by briefly reviewing the history of transit modeling, from the earliest theoretical models…
Lévy processes are a universal model for characterizing the behavior of extreme events and anomalously diffusive systems. They are also important in modeling the transport of laser-cooled atoms. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of Lévy processes themselves, and…
Stars, and collections of stars, encode rich signatures of stellar physics and galaxy evolution. With properties influenced by both their environment and intrinsic nature, stars retain information about astrophysical phenomena that are not otherwise directly observable. In the t…