There has been widespread concern expressed by members of the statistics education community in the past few years about the lack of any real understanding demonstrated by many students completing courses in introductory statistics. This deficiency in understanding has been particularly noted in the area of inferential statistics, where students, particularly those studying statistics as a service course, have been inclined to view statistical inference as a set of unrelated recipes. As such, these students have developed skills that have little practical application and are easily forgotten. This thesis is concerned with the development of understanding in statistical inference for beginning students of statistics at the post-secondary level. This involves consideration of the nature of understanding in introductory statistical inference, and how understanding can be measured in the context of statistical inference. In particular, the study has examined the role of the sampling distribution in the students? schemas for statistical inference, and its relationship to both conceptual and procedural understanding. The results of the study have shown that, as anticipated, students will construct highly individual schemas for statistical inference but that the degree of integration of the concept of sampling distribution within this schema is indicative of the level of development of conceptual understanding in that student. The results of the study have practical implications for the teaching of courses in introductory statistics, in terms of content, delivery and assessment.

Mixed linear models are a time honored method of analyzing correlated data. However, there is still no method of calculating exact confidence intervals or p-values for an arbitrary parameter in any mixed linear model. Instead, researchers must use either specialized approximate and exact tests that have been developed for particular models or rely on likelihood based approximate tests and confidence intervals which may be unreliable in problems with small sample sizes. This thesis develops procedures to improve small sample likelihood based inference in these important models. The first manuscript develops I.M. Skovgaard's modified directed likelihood for mixed linear models and shows how it is a general, accurate, and easy to apply method of improving inference in mixed linear models. In the second manuscript, O.E. Barndorff-Nielsen's approximate modified profile likelihood is applied to mixed linear models. This modified profile likelihood is a sensible generalization of the commonly used residual likelihood and can be applied if either a fixed or a covariance parameter is of interest. The final manuscript discusses how the design of a mixed linear model effects the accuracy of Skovgaard's modified likelihood and suggests a useful decomposition of that statistic. / Graduation date: 1998

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Restricted until November 2003. Bibliography: leaves 170-178.

Thesis (PhD.) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 21).

Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Santosh Vempala; Committee Member: Adam Kalai; Committee Member: Haesun Park; Committee Member: Ravi Kannan; Committee Member: Vladimir Koltchinskii. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-231). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Copulas have been known in the statistical literature for many years, and have become useful tools in modeling dependence structure of multivariate random variables, overcoming some of the drawbacks of the commonly-used correlation measures. Goodness-of-fit tests for copulas play a very important role in evaluating the suitability of a potential input copula model. In recent years, many approaches have been proposed for constructing goodness-of-fit tests for copula families. Among them, the so-called “blanket tests" do not require an arbitrary data categorization or any strategic choice of weight function, smoothing parameter, kernel, and so on. As preliminaries, some background and related results of copulas are firstly presented. Three goodness-of-fit test statistics belonging to the blanket test classification are then introduced. Since the asymptotic distributions of the test statistics are very complicated, parametric bootstrap procedures are employed to approximate critical values of the test statistics under the null hypotheses. To assess the performance of the three test statistics in the low dependence cases, simulation studies are carried out for three bivariate copula families, namely the Gumbel-Hougaard copula family, the Ali-Mikhail-Haq copula family, and the Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula family. Specifically the effect of low dependence on the empirical sizes and powers of the three blanket tests under various combinations of null and alternative copula families are examined. Furthermore, to check the performance of the three tests for higher dimensional copulas, the simulation studies are extended to some three-dimensional copulas. Finally the three goodness-of-fit tests are applied to two real data sets. / published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Infant and child mortality rates are one of the health indicators in a given community or country. It is the fourth millennium development goal that by 2015, all the united nations member countries are expected to have reduced their infant and child mortality rates by two-thirds. Uganda is one of those countries in sub-Saharan Africa with high infant and child mortality rates and therefore has the need to find out the factors strongly associated to these high rates in order to provide alternative or maintain the existing interventions. The Uganda Demographic Health Survey (UDHS) funded by USAID, UNFPA, UNICEF, Irish Aid and the United kingdom government provides a data set which is rich in information. This information has attracted many researchers and some of it can be used to help Uganda monitor her infant and child mortality rates to achieve the fourth millennium goal. Survival analysis techniques and frailty modelling is a well developed statistical tool in analysing time to event data. These methods were adopted in this thesis to examine factors affecting under-five child mortality in Uganda using the UDHS data for 2011 using R and STATA software. Results obtained by fitting the Cox-proportional hazard model and frailty models and drawing inference using both the Frequentists and Bayesian approach showed that, Demographic factors (sex of the household head, sex of the child and number of births in the past one year) are strongly associated with high under-five child mortality rates. Heterogeneity or unobserved covariates were found to be signifcant at household but insignifcant at community level. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.