No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Simultaneous testing of multiple null hypotheses has now become an integral part of statistical analysis of data arising from modern scientific investigations. Often the test statistics in such multiple testing problem are correlated. The research in this dissertation is motivated by the scope of improving or extending existing methods to incorporate correlation in the data. Sarkar (2008) proposes controlling the pairwise false discovery rate (Pairwise-FDR), which inherently takes into account the dependence among the p-values, thereby making it a more robust, less conservative and more powerful under dependence than the usual notion of FDR. In this dissertation, we further investigate the performance of Pairwise-FDR under a dependent mixture model. In particular, we consider a step-up method to control the Pairwise-FDR under this model assuming that the correlation between any two p-values is the same (exchangeable). We also suggest improving this method by incorporating an estimate of the number of pairs of true null hypotheses developed under this model. Efron (2007, Journal of the American Statistical Association 102, 93-103) proposed a novel approach to incorporate dependence among the null p-values into a multiple testing method controlling false discoveries. In this dissertation, we try to investigate the scope of utilizing this approach by proposing alternative versions of adaptive Bonferroni and BH methods which estimates the number of true null hypotheses from the empirical null distribution introduced by Efron. These newer adaptive procedures have been numerically shown to perform better than existing adaptive Bonferroni or BH methods within a wider range of dependence. A gene expression microarray data set has been used to highlight the difference in results obtained upon applying the proposed and other adaptive BH methods. Another approach to address the presence of correlation is motivated by the scope of utilizing the dependence structure of the data towards further improving some multiple testing methods while maintaining control of some error rate. The dependence structure of the data is incorporated using pairwise weights. In this dissertation we propose a weighted version of the pairwise FDR (Sarkar, 2008) using pairwise weights and a method controlling the weighted pairwise- FDR. We give a discussion on the application of such weighted procedure and suggest some weighting schemes that generates pairwise weights. / Statistics

Monitoring electromyography signals (EMG) leads to a greater understanding of muscle properties hives insight into how muscles work together to coordinate tasks, and yields information about neuromuscular disorders. In this project we developed a PC based EMG data acquisition and analysis system to record and analysis EMG signals. We tested this system by recording EMG signals from the biceps brachii of a single normal subject. The acquired data was analyzed in both time and frequency domains to determine the behavior of the EMG signal during different experiment conditions. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) were applied during digital signal processing. The FFT only provides the information in frequency domain. STFT is a modification of the Fourier transform in an attempt to retain both time and frequency information during signal analysis. The STFT produces a two dimensional function with time and frequency as variables. Thus the STFT gives information about when in time a given frequency component occurs. The extracted features of EMG are RMS value, mean absolute value, mean power frequency, and median power frequency. The raw EMG signal is collected for 10 seconds. The sampling rate is set to 1000 Hz. The emphases of this project were software development, data collection, and simple signal analysis. / Thesis / Master of Engineering (ME)

The Punch test provides a technique for the determination of material properties from small specimens. Using the rectangular specimen, the test can be used to control the orientation of the cracking plane which was not possible in the ball punch on a circular disk design. A three dimensional quarter finite element model was formulated to simulate the punch test for 150°C and 300°C tests performed on So8 steel. The comparison of predicted and measured load-deflection and stress-strain curves showed good agreement between FE model and tests. A user interface, which allows for routine application, with the necessary postprocessing capabilities was developed and tested for the purpose of simulating miniature punch tests and estimating stress-strain data from measured load curves. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)