Most classification rules can be expressed in terms of a distance (or dissimilarity) from the point to be classified to each of the candidate classes. For example, linear discriminant analysis classifies points into the class for which the (sample) Mahalanobis distance is smallest. However, dependence among these point-to-group distance measures is generally ignored. The primary goal of this project is to investigate the properties of a general non-parametric classification rule which takes this dependence structure into account. A review of classification procedures and applications is presented. The distance profile nearest-neighbor classification rule is defined. Properties of the rule are then explored via application to both real and simulated data and comparisons to other classification rules are discussed.

陳建. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-194) / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Chen Jian.

Globally, as distance education has become firmly embedded as a part of the higher education landscape, governments and institutions are calling for meaningful research on distance education. This study involved designing, developing and validating a learning environment survey instrument for use in distance education-delivered courses in post-secondary education. Specifically it involved merging two distinctive areas of study: psychosocial learning environments research and distance education research. The unique social structure of asynchronous distance education learning environments requires a unique and economical instrument for measuring the perceptions of distance education course participants. The research followed a three-stage instrument-development process of identifying salient scales, developing survey items, and field testing and analysing data using item analysis and validation procedures. This was followed by an investigation into the associations between the psychosocial learning environment and students enjoyment of distance education. The results yielded a new six-scale, 34-item Web-based learning environment instrument suitable for use in a number of asynchronous post-secondary distance education environments. The new instrument, the Distance Education Learning Environment Survey (DELES) assesses Instructor Support, Student Interaction and Collaboration, Personal Relevance, Authentic Learning, Active Learning, and Student Autonomy. Analyses of data obtained from 680 subjects supported the factorial validity and internal consistency reliability. The results also indicated statistically significant associations between the distance education learning environment and student enjoyment of distance education.

Thesis (M. Ed.(Educational psychology))-University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

<p>The purpose of this essay is to show <em>the opportunities and difficulties</em> of teaching within distance education. I will show this from two different parts of the world. One being Sweden and the other Australia, both countries run a distance education program with similar reasons students whom travelling, some living hundreds of miles from any schools and some students with health and or social disadvantages. This study is based on the actual teacher’s accounts and experiences the opportunities and difficulties in teaching in distance. The main method of collecting this data has been through interviews with the teachers, a distance-school administrator and a researcher from Sweden. A survey was mailed to Australia which has been filled in and returned by an administrator/head teacher for distance education. The main research questions asked were:</p><ul><li>What are teacher’s experiences in distance education?</li><li>What are the opportunities and difficulties by teaching in distance education?</li></ul><p>The interview conversations has been structured, generalised and reformulated in order to form a concrete set of teachers overall experiences. The literatures were support for many of the teacher’s thoughts and even things that compliment and add a broader picture of the subject and the results are discussed and weighed up against teacher’s own experiences.</p><p>The study reaches the conclusion of how the teachers express are of opportunities and difficulties in teaching the students in the best possible way, to stimulate learning by not only focus on teaching content but also on its learning environment.</p>

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 133 p. : map. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-100).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Dale W. Lick, Florida State University, College of Education, Dept. of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Stabilizer codes form a special class of quantum error correcting codes. Nonbinary quantum stabilizer codes are studied in this thesis. A lot of work on binary quantum stabilizer codes has been done. Nonbinary stabilizer codes have received much less attention. Various results on binary stabilizer codes such as various code families and general code constructions are generalized to the nonbinary case in this thesis. The lower bound on the minimum distance of a code is nothing but the minimum distance of the currently best known code. The focus of this research is to improve the lower bounds on this minimum distance. To achieve this goal, various existing quantum codes are studied that have good minimum distance. Some new families of nonbinary stabilizer codes such as quantum BCH codes are constructed. Different ways of constructing new codes from the existing ones are also found. All these constructions together help improve the lower bounds.

Habitat loss is one of the leading causes of species decline across all taxa and conservation practices require information on population trends. The Mescalero Sands ecosystem, New Mexico, USA, is experiencing landscape changes associated with oil and gas development. The dune-dwelling lizard community contains a habitat specialist, Sceloporus arenicolus, that is of particular interest because it has a very limited geographic distribution that is entirely subject to oil and gas development. Distance sampling is widely used to estimate population densities of many vertebrate taxa however assumptions can be difficult to satisfy with certain species or in certain habitats. Researchers must investigate the likelihood that assumptions can be satisfied before implementing any population sampling method. I had two objectives. First to investigate the precision of population densities of dune-dwelling lizards estimated via distance sampling that was coupled with double-observer surveys. Second to compare abundances of dune-dwelling lizards among sites that varied in oil and gas development. I conducted distance line transects and compared those density estimates to densities obtained from total removal plots. I quantified the amount of oil and gas development, habitat quantity and quality and correlated those to lizard abundances to investigate the effects of oil and gas development on lizard populations. I found large differences in density estimates from distance sampling and total removal plots that resulted from violation of distance sampling assumptions. Although distance sampling is a low cost method, it does not produce reliable density estimates for dune-dwelling lizards and is not an appropriate sampling method in this system. I did not find oil and gas development effects on the habitat quantity, quality or on the abundances of lizards. Lizard abundances were most strongly correlated to habitat quantity. Lizard abundances may be influenced by complex interactions between oil and gas development and habitat quantity and quality but controlling for those interactions was beyond the scope of my study. Before and after experiments and long-term studies at multiple sites would be required to more fully address the effects of oil and gas development on lizard populations in the Mescalero Sands.

The difficulty of clustering and the variety of clustering methods suggest the need for a theoretical study of clustering. Using the idea of a standard statistical framework, we propose a new framework for clustering. For a well-defined clustering goal we assume that the data to be clustered come from an underlying distribution and we aim to find a high-density cluster tree. We regard this tree as a parameter of interest for the underlying distribution. However, it is not obvious how to determine a connected subset in a discrete distribution whose support is located in a Euclidean space. Building a cluster tree for such a distribution is an open problem and presents interesting conceptual and computational challenges. We solve this problem using graph-based approaches and further parameterize clustering using the high-density cluster tree and its extension. Motivated by the connection between clustering outcomes and graphs, we propose a graph family framework. This framework plays an important role in our clustering framework. A direct application of the graph family framework is a new cluster-tree distance measure. This distance measure can be written as an inner product or kernel. It makes our clustering framework able to perform statistical assessment of clustering via simulation. Other applications such as a method for integrating partitions into a cluster tree and methods for cluster tree averaging and bagging are also derived from the graph family framework.