The thesis proposes a method for automated model selection using a logistic regression model in the context of prospectivity modeling, i.e. the exploration of minearlisations. This kind of data is characterized by a rare positive event and a large dataset. We adapted and combined the two statistical measures Wald statistic and Bayes' information criterion making it suitable for the processing of large data and a high number of variables that emerge in the nonlinear setting of logistic regression. The obtained models of our suggested method are parsimonious allowing for an interpretation and information gain. The advantages of our method are shown by comparing it to another model selection method and to arti cial neural networks on several datasets. Furthermore we introduced a possibility to induce spatial dependencies which are important in such geological settings.

Terrorism is academically understood as the quest of non-state actors to cause fear beyond the immediate victims of their action to reach political goals. Means that have an immense psychological impact are therefore expected to be sought after to a high extent by these actors. This paper seeks therefore to explain the surprisingly low frequency of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) attacks by non-state actors and why the attempts which have been made rarely accomplish to cause mass casualties, also called super terrorism. Through multiple logistic regression analysis of data from the Profiles of Incidents Involving CBRN and Non-state Actors (POICN) database, this study found that lack of actor experience from prior CBRN attempts is correlated to failed CBRN events. The paper also found that events before the year 2001 did fail to a higher extent than after 2001. However, the paper did not find support for hypotheses provided by the literature regarding how sophisticated the plot was or that the perpetrator motive affected the outcome of CBRN events. The study did neither find support for alternative explanations regarding that regime type or state wealth correlated with the outcome of CBRN events. Further research should therefore involve grounded theoretical work in both conventional as CBRN terrorism studies as theoretical frameworks lack in the field which has negative complications for this type of positivistic hypothesis-testing studies. Without studies that test theoretical claims, CBRN terrorism studies are at risk of being contaminated with cognitive biases regarding the severity and frequency of the threat.

Predicting when a customer is about to turn to a competitor can be difficult, yet extremely valuable from a business perspective. The moment a customer stops being considered a customer is known as churn, a widely researched topic in several industries when dealing with subscription-services. However, in industries with non-subscription services and products, defining churn can be a daunting task and the existing literature does not fully cover this field. Therefore, this thesis can be seen as a contribution to current research, specially when not having a set definition for churn. A definition for churn, adjusted to DIAKRIT’s business, is created. DIAKRIT is a company working in the real estate industry, which faces many challenges, such as a huge seasonality. The prediction was approached as a supervised problem, where three different Machine Learning methods were used: Logistic Regression, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine. The variables used in the predictions are predominantly activity data. With a relatively high accuracy and AUC-score, Random Forest was concluded to be the most reliable model. It is however clear that the model cannot separate between the classes perfectly. It was also visible that the Random Forest model produces a relatively high precision. Thereby, it can be settled that even though the model is not flawless the customers predicted to churn are very likely to churn. / Att prediktera när en kund är påväg att vända sig till en konkurrent kan vara svårt, dock kan det visa sig extremt värdefullt ur ett affärsperspektiv. När en kund slutar vara kund benäms det ofta som kundbortfall eller ”churn”. Detta är ett ämne som är brett forskat på i flertalet olika industrier, men då ofta i situationer med prenumenationstjänster. När man inte har en prenumerationstjänst försvåras uppgiften att definera churn och existerande studier brister i att analysera detta. Denna uppsats kan därför ses som ett bidrag till nuvarande litteratur, i synnerhet i fall där ingen tydlig definition för churn existerar. En definition för churn, anpassad efter DIAKRIT och deras affärsstruktur har skapats i det här projektet. DIAKRIT är verksamma i fastighetsbranschen, en industri som har flera utmaningar, bland annat en extrem säsongsvariaton. För att genomföra prediktionerna användes tre olika maskininlärningamodeller: Logistisk Regression, Random Forest och Support Vector Machine. De variabler som användes är mestadels aktivitetsdata. Med relativt hög noggranhet och AUC-värde anses Random Forest vara mest pålitlig. Modellen kan dock inte separera mellan de två klasserna perfekt. Random Forest modellen visade sig också genera en hög precision. Därför kan slutsatsen dras att även om modellen inte är felfri verkar det som att kunderna predikterade som churn mest sannolikt kommer churna.

This diploma thesis deals with the issue of bankruptcy prediction of small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the manufacturing industry in selected Central European countries. The theoretical part of the thesis defines the concepts related to the prediction of bankruptcy and methods of model creation. The analytical part of the work includes testing the accuracy of selected bankruptcy model by other authors and creating a new bankruptcy model. The accuracy of the newly created model is then compared with the accuracy of selected models by other authors.

The aim of the study was to evaluate dierent types of logistic regression to find the optimal model to predict the gender of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The models were based on COVID-19 case series data from Pakistan using a set of 18 explanatory variables out of which patient age and BMI were numerical and the rest were categorical variables, expressing symptoms and previous health issues.  Compared were a logistic regression using all variables, a logistic regression that used stepwise variable selection with 4 explanatory variables, a logistic Ridge regression model, a logistic Lasso regression model and a logistic Elastic Net regression model.  Based on several metrics assessing the goodness of fit of the models and the evaluation of predictive power using the area under the ROC curve the Elastic Net that was only using the Lasso penalty had the best result and was able to predict 82.5% of the test cases correctly.

The main goal of a forensic anthropological analysis of unidentified human remains is to establish an accurate biological profile. The largest obstacle in the creation or validation of techniques specific for subadults is the lack of large, modern samples. Techniques created for subadults were mainly derived from antiquated North American or European samples and thus inapplicable to a modern South African population as the techniques lack diversity and ignore the secular trends in modern children. This research provides accurate and reliable methods to estimate age and sex of South African subadults aged birth to 12 years from long bone lengths and breadths, as no appropriate techniques exist. Standard postcraniometric variables (n = 18) were collected from six long bones on 1380 (males = 804, females = 506) Lodox Statscan-generated radiographic images housed at the Forensic Pathology Service, Salt River and the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Measurement definitions were derived from and/or follow studies in fetal and subadult osteology and longitudinal growth studies. Radiographic images were generated between 2007 and 2012, thus the majority of children (70%) were born after 2000 and thus reflect the modern population. Because basis splines and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) are nonparametric the 95% prediction intervals associated with each age at death model were calculated with cross-validation. Numerous classification methods were employed namely linear, quadratic, and flexible discriminant analysis, logistic regression, naïve Bayes, and random forests to identify the method that consistently yielded the lowest error rates. Because some of the multivariate subsets demonstrated small sample sizes, the classification accuracies were bootstrapped to validate results. Both univariate and multivariate models were employed in the age and sex estimation analyses. Standard errors for the age estimation models were smaller in most of the multivariate models with the exception of the univariate humerus, femur, and tibia diaphyseal lengths. Univariate models provide narrower age estimates at the younger ages but the multivariate models provide narrower age estimates at the older ages. Diaphyseal lengths did not demonstrate any significant sex differences at any age, but diaphyseal breadths demonstrated significant sex differences throughout the majority of the ages. Classification methods utilizing multivariate subsets achieved the highest accuracies, which offer practical applicability in forensic anthropology (81% to 90%). Whereas logistic regression yielded the highest classification accuracies for univariate models, FDA yielded the highest classification accuracies for multivariate models. This study is the first to successfully estimate subadult age and sex using an extensive number of measurements, univariate and multivariate models, and robust statistical analyses. The success of the current study is directly related to the large, modern sample size, which ultimately captured a wider range of human variation than previously collected for subadult diaphyseal dimensions. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Anatomy / unrestricted

Factor score regression has recently received growing interest as an alternative for structural equation modelling. Two issues causing uncertainty for researchers are addressed in this thesis. Firstly, more knowledge is needed on how different approaches to calculating factor score estimates compare when estimating factor score regression models. Secondly, many applications are left without guidance because of the focus on normally distributed outcomes in the literature. This thesis examines how factor scoring methods compare when estimating regression coefficients in generalised linear factor score regression. An evaluation is made of the regression, correlation-preserving, total sum, and weighted sum method in ordinary, logistic, and Poisson factor score regression. In contrast to previous studies, both the mean and variance of loading coefficients and the degree of inter-factor correlation are varied in the simulations. A meta-analysis demonstrates that the choice of factor scoring method can substantially influence research conclusions. The regression and correlation-preserving method outperform the other two methods in terms of coefficient and standard error bias, accuracy, and empirical Type I error rates. Moreover, the regression method generally has the best performance. It is also noticed that performance can differ notably across the considered regression models.

This thesis concentrates on regression models with a categorical response. It focuses on the model of logistic regression with binary response and its generalization in which two models are distinguished: multinomial regression with nominal response and multinomial regression with ordinal response. For all three models separately, the Wald test and the likelihood ratio test are derived. These theoretical derivations are then used to calculate the test statistics for specific examples in statistical software R. The theory described in the thesis is illustrated by examples with small and large number of explanatory variables.

This diploma thesis focuses on the so-called "migration crisis" and its impact on public opinion across the European Union (EU) between the years 2014 and 2017. It stems from existing literature that works with the concept of perceived group threat. The main goal is to analyze individual-level and contextual-level factors that played a key role in a certain development of native population's negative attitudes towards migrants and refugees. Such context is represented by the EU member states. An important part of the analysis deals with the relative imporance of contextual-level factors vis-à-vis individual-level determinants. Based on the results of multinomial multilevel logistic regression, the study finds that contextual-level characteristics had a substantial impact on negative attitudes towards immigrants and a large impact on negative attitudes towards refugees. Moreover, the importance of contextual determinants increased in 2015 and 2016, respectively, followed by a decline in the subsequent period. The analyses also revealed that during the "migration crisis" the impact of specific categories of explanatory variables evolved differently. Furthermore, it was shown that educational attainment, preferred social identity and different historical immigration legacies had a considerably...

Der Zusammenhang zwischen den Begriffen "Chance" (odd) und "Wahrscheinlichkeit" (probability) und die Anwendung des Chancenverhältnisses (odds ratio) im Bereich der Biometrie und bei der logistischen Regression werden erläutert. Es wird auf mögliche Fehlinterpretationen der Begriffe Chance und Chancenverhältnis hingewiesen.