Marginal inference for waiting times in multi-stage time-to-event models is complicated by right censoring of observations as well as the prior history of events in the model. In general, complications arise due to the evolution of the censoring...
This study focuses on the variation in structural response to synthetic ground motions derived from the latest attenuation models developed for the Central Eastern United States (CEUS) and used by the USGS to develop the latest edition (2008) of...
Data mining; Lungs--Cancer; Outcome assessment (Medical care)
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and the world, with more than 1.3 million deaths worldwide per year. However, because of a lack of effective tools to diagnose Lung Cancer, more than half of all cases are...
Genes in folate metabolizing pathway are responsible for modulating key enzymes in folate metabolisms necessary for DNA synthesis and repair and influence DNA methylation. Irregularity in DNA methylation may modify tumor phenotype response to...
Nonparametric statistics; Estimation theory; Distribution (Probability theory)
Multistate models are a type of multi-variate survival data which provide a framework for describing a complex system where individuals transition through a series of distinct states. This research focuses on nonparametric inference for general...
Problem children--Education--United States; Alternative schools--United States; School discipline--United States; Juvenile detention--United States; School children--United States--Discipline
Alternative school settings for students who are identified as "disruptive or dangerous" are playing an increasingly prominent role in the world of public education, yet many gaps in the research literature are abound. This dissertation...
A common research interest in medical, biological, and engineering research is determining whether certain independent variables are correlated with the survival or failure times. Standard statistical techniques cannot usually be applied for...
In this dissertation research, we aim to solve problems of two types of survival data, clustered survival data with potentially informative cluster size and sojourn time data. The methods for these two types of data are different. However, both...
This dissertation is an examination of fire department response times in eight major cities of the United States including Houston, TX, Charlotte, NC, St. Paul, MN, Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, Louisville, KY, San Francisco, CA and Miami, FL. This...
Medical care--Decision making; Decision making--Simulation methods
A variety of methodologies have been employed for decision making related to the treatment of diseases/injury. Decision trees are a functional way in which to examine problems under uncertainty by providing a method to analyze decisions under risk...
Because of limitations in randomized controlled trials, medical researchers are often forced to rely upon studies of observational data. Confounding is a major difficulty encountered in such studies that can create considerable bias in estimates of...
The following thesis examines the relationship between site geology and ground motion amplification for medium sized earthquake events in the Ohio Valley area. This thesis also includes a Rapid Screening Guide that can be used to estimate...
Background: CHF is a chronic disease that affects nearly five million people each year; in which at least 500,000 are newly diagnosed cases. Patients diagnosed with this disease will be under a physician's care for the remainder of their life. It...
In recent years, a number of computational and statistical problems for identifying SNP-SNP interactions in high dimensional survival data have been studied, and several data mining approaches have been proposed. However, the relative performance...
Accelerated life testing; Reliability (Engineering); Service life (Engineering)
This dissertation is focused on finding lower confidence limits for the reliability of systems consisting of Wei bull components when the reliability demonstration testing (RDT) is conducted with zero failures. The usual methods for the parameter...
New firms face financial constraints that could hinder firm performance. Yet founders exhibit persistence and resourcefulness in building their new ventures and finding solutions to their financial constraints. The use of financial theories that...
It is important to burn the air toxics and harmful gases which come from water and wastewater treatment processes. In common practice, instead of natural gas, digester gas is used for economical reasons. This burning process takes place in the...
Bioinformatics; Breast--Cancer--Treatment; Medical care--Data processing
Statistical models have been the first choice for comparative effectiveness in clinical research. Though effective, these models are limited when the data to be analyzed do not fit the assumed distributions; which is mostly the case when the study...
The complexity of high-dimensional data creates a number of concerns when trying to analyze it. This data often consists of a response or survival time and potentially thousands of predictors. These predictors can be highly correlated, and the...
English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching; English language--Composition and exercises--Study and teaching; Community colleges--Kentucky--Louisville
The introduction to this doctoral dissertation is an argument for locating Writing Across the Curriculum programs on the community-college campus for several reasons, among them the proximity of the disciplines on the community college campus, the...