O objetivo do trabalho é apresentar os métodos mais consagrados de Análise Discriminante quando temos uma mistura de variáveis categóricas e contínuas. / The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze and compare Discriminant Analysis techniques in the presence of mixed categorical and continuous data.

Thesis (M.M. (Research))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Governance, 2016. / Most economies today are calling upon their or rather are starting to rely on their Small and Medium business Enterprises to stimulate the economy and also help address issues of unemployment. However it is also believed that even though this maybe the case, most economies still don’t give SMEs enough funding. The underlying public assumption is that all that is needed for SMEs to thrive is access to funding, as such this study sought to investigate the role of financial access in the success of SMEs. The study had intended to use financial ratios as proxies for success, however, the record keeping of the SMEs or lack thereof impeded this intention, so the study measured the success of the enterprise as perceived by the owner. The study sampled SMEs from all for regions of Swaziland, and besides a descriptive analysis that were carried out to examine the utilization of credit by the SMEs. This study also used a statistical model known as the Logit model, to determine the effect that credit access had on the success of the SME and also assess the challenges/barriers that the SMEs faced when trying to access funding. The results of this study deviated from the underlying public assumption, as they showed that an SME owner that had access to funding had reduced odds of success, if anything the results showed that the success of an SME did not entirely depend on the availability of funding, and there were other potent factors that posed as barriers to financial access. / DM2016

Magíster en Ingeniería de Negocios con Tecnología de Información / Chile se encuentra inmerso en el complejo fenómeno de la globalización. Uno de los aspectos que destaca en este escenario es la coexistencia de empresas locales y extranjeras, las cuales tienen grandes diferencias operativas, causadas principalmente por el desnivel que existe en el desarrollo económico, industrial, tecnológico, de investigación y desarrollo (I+D) entre el país de origen y el nuestro. Es por ello que la innovación y el cambio tecnológico se consideran como factores clave para el crecimiento económico de los países y guardan una íntima relación con el gasto que las empresas y los gobiernos destinan a I+D, que se refleja en número de patentes ó el número de innovaciones obtenidas. Este proyecto propone un rediseño de los procesos de modelo venta proveedor en BancoEstado Microempresas, contar con un Modelo de atención especializado que eficiente la relación de los microempresarios que compran en los proveedores de bienes y equipamientos asociados a su rubro. Para lograr lo anterior, el proyecto integra a las evaluaciones de clientes un modelo de credit scoring. Para materializar lo anterior se genera un modelo de atención, basado en un canal de venta alternativo a la plataforma comercial, que implique: Curse de créditos en forma centralizada Agilidad en el cierre de negocio Aportar en el volumen de operaciones Generar mayor satisfacción en el Cliente final. Con todo esto podemos establecer una clara hipótesis la que indica que para obtener financiamiento, no es necesario que el cliente concurra a una sucursal del Banco para gestionarlo, el Banco a través de la atención descentralizada y oportuna en el punto de compra de los bienes de inversión, puede entregar el financiamiento requerido, acotando los tiempos de atención y mejorando la satisfacción del cliente. El rediseño de procesos se basa en la metodología de diseño a partir de patrones de procesos, y detalla desde la arquitectura de procesos hasta el diseño del apoyo computacional y lógicas de negocio requeridos para implementarlo.

Though applied in bioarchaeology, dental wear is an underexplored age indicator in the biological anthropology of contemporary populations, although research has been conducted on dental attrition in forensic contexts (Kim et al. 2000, Prince et al. 2008, Yun et al. 2007). The purpose of this study is to apply and adapt existing techniques for age estimation based on dental wear to a modern American population, with the aim of producing accurate age range estimates for individuals from an industrialized context. Methodologies following Yun and Prince were applied to a random sample from the University of New Mexico (n=583) and Universidade de Coimbra (n=50) cast and skeletal collections. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between tooth wear scores and age. Application of both Yun et al. (2007) and Prince et al. (2008) methodologies resulted in inaccurate age estimates. Recalibrated sectioning points correctly classified individuals as over or under 50 years for 88% of the sample. Linear regression demonstrated 60% of age estimates fell within ±10 years of the actual age, and accuracy improved for individuals under 45 years, with 74% of predictions within ±10 years. This study demonstrates that age estimation from dental wear is possible for modern populations, with comparable age intervals to other established methods. It provides a quantifiable method of seriation into “older” and “younger” adult categories, and is a more reliable method than cranial sutures in instances where only the skull is available. / 2019-07-11T00:00:00Z

The resources required to have humans score extended written response items in English language learner (ELL) contexts has caused automated essay scoring (AES) to emerge as a desired alternative. However, these systems often rely heavily on indirect proxies of writing quality such as word, sentence, and essay lengths because of their strong correlation to scores (Vajjala, 2017). This has led to concern about the validity of the features used to establish the predictive accuracy of AES systems (Attali, 2007; Weigle, 2013). Reliance on construct-irrelevant features in ELL contexts also forfeits the opportunity to provide meaningful diagnostic feedback to test-takers or provide the second language acquisition (SLA) field with real insights (C.-F. E. Chen & Cheng, 2008). This thesis seeks to improve the validity and reliability of an AES system developed for ELL essays by employing a new set of features based on the acquisition order of English negation. Modest improvements were made to a baseline AES system's accuracy, showing the possibility and importance of engineering features relevant to the construct being assessed in ELL essays. In addition to these findings, a novel ordering of the sequence of English negation acquisition not previously described in SLA research emerged.

Trend scoring is often used in large-scale assessments to monitor for rater drift when the same constructed response items are administered in multiple test administrations. In trend scoring, a set of responses from Time A are rescored by raters at Time B. The purpose of this study is to examine the ability of trend-monitoring statistics to detect rater effects in the context of trend scoring. The present study examines the percent of exact agreement and Cohen’s kappa as interrater agreement measures, and the paired t-test and Stuart’s Q as marginal homogeneity measures. Data that contains specific rater effects is simulated under two frameworks: the generalized partial credit model and the latent-class signal detection theory model. The findings indicate that the percent of exact agreement, the paired t-test, and Stuart’s Q showed high Type I error rates under a rescore design in which half of the rescore papers have a uniform score distribution and the other half have a score distribution proportional to the population papers at Time A. All these Type I errors were reduced when using a rescore design in which all rescore papers have a score distribution proportional to the population papers at Time A. For the second rescore design, results indicate that the ability of the percent of exact agreement, Cohen’s kappa, and the paired t-test in detecting various effects varied across items, sample sizes, and type of rater effect. The only statistic that always detected every level of rater effect across items and frameworks was Stuart’s Q. Although advances have been made in the automated scoring field, the fact is that many testing programs require humans to score constructed response items. Previous research indicates that rater effects are common in constructed response scoring. In testing programs that keep trends in data across time, changes in scoring across time confound the measurement of change in student performance. Therefore, the study of methods to ensure rating consistency across time, such as trend scoring, is important and needed to ensure fairness and validity.

Rapid development of domain specialized medical imaging tools is essential for deploying medical imaging technologies to advance clinical research and clinical practice. This work describes the development process, deployment method, and evaluation of modules constructed within the 3D Slicer environment. These tools address critical problems encountered in four different clinical domains: quality control review of large repositories of medical images, rule-based automated label map cleaning, quantification of calcification in the heart using low-dose radiation scanning, and waist circumference measurement from abdominal scans. Each of these modules enables and accelerates clinical research by incorporating medical imaging technologies that minimize manual human effort. They are distributed within the multi-platform 3D Slicer Extension Manager environment for use in the computational environment most convenient to the clinician scientist.

The purpose of this study was to see if the Koppitz objective scoring method for interpreting children's human figure drawings could be used as a valid assessment instrument with elementary school children. Human figure drawings were obtained from two matched groups of elementary school students, a normal and an emotionally disturbed group. The results of the comparison of human figure drawings of the two groups did not support Koppitz's findings. The Koppitz objective scoring method was found to be invalid as an assessment instrument with elementary school children and of doubtful use in diagnosing emotionally disturbed children. Possible explanations for the differences in results and areas for further research were discussed.

Spelling ability is not static; rather, as children age, learning how to encode morphophonologically complex words in conventional ways is motivated by the increasingly complex demands imposed by academic experiences with morphologically complex words. Success requires ongoing integration of phonological (P), orthographic (O) and morphological (M) knowledge. However, current research on the development and assessment of spelling has not sufficiently accounted for the way word features and participant characteristics interact with students' POM knowledge in the spelling of derived words. This study used a linear mixed effects regression approach to provide new insights about how both word characteristics and students' linguistic knowledge affected the application of POM from grades 3-7 in the spelling of derived forms. Spelling data (WIAT-II) were taken from a larger longitudinal study focused on reading development (Garcia et. al., 2010). Eleven words from the WIAT-II with derivational morphology (which included one inflected form with a derived homophone possibility) were analyzed first with the Phonological Orthographic Morphological Analysis of Spelling (POMAS; an unconstrained scoring system) in order to identify linguistic feature errors within misspellings. Next, misspellings were quantified with the POMplexity metric to evaluate the individual and combined influences of phonology (P), orthography (O), and morphology (M) to derivational misspellings over time. A linear mixed effects regression approach evaluated the impact of item-level characteristics (derivational frequency and shifts), participant characteristics (rime, spelling choice and morphological awareness task scores), and time (grade level) on POMplexity scores. Results indicated item-level characteristics, participant characteristics and time significantly predicted variation in P, O, M, and total POMplexity scores. Frequency had a significant impact on scores, with high frequency words resulting in lower POMplexity scores than low frequency words and these effects were most obvious in grades 3 and 4. Slope differences between words suggested that low frequency misspellings resolve more rapidly than high frequency words. Derivational shift was shown to have a significant interaction with time for O, M and Total scores, but not P scores. In all cases, the slopes for derived words with no shift improved more quickly than shift categories. Finally, performance on measures on the measures of linguistic skill correlated to improved scores for the related POMplexity code. These results strongly suggest that the developmental course of learning to spell derivations is not a linear accumulation of POM knowledge, but instead is a recursive process with both general and word-specific knowledge affecting how an individual student produces a derivational spelling at any given point in time. Contributions of word characteristics, such as frequency and number/type of derivational shift, suggest that morphemic features challenge encoding; that is, increased complexity taxes the system's ability to represent both sound and meaning orthographically. Educational and clinical implications will be described.

Some syntactic aspects of the oral language of 20 mildly intellectually handicapped, 20 normal seven year old and 20 normal ten year old children were examined in order to determine the comparative development of the mildly intellectually handicapped children and some of the difficulties they might experience. The language was classified into 24 categories for various types of analysis. These types included traditional counts and an examination of the types of subordination as well as of non-conventional usage. In addition, Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee : 1974) was used to assess the maturity of personal pronoun and main and secondary verb usage. The sentence repetition technique was employed as a means of assessing competence in a variety of later-developing structures. Questions were designed to assess ability in other specific syntactic areas. Analysis of variance was used to compare group scores and determine if any significant differences occurred. Several significant differences did occur. The findings provided strong evidence that the language of mildly intellectually handicapped children is more like that of children of the same chronological age than it is like that of children of the same mental age and that it is less mature than the former. These handicapped children experience considerable delay in the development of pronouns and verbs and have a high incidence of non-conventional usage. This study also provided evidence of the continuing language development of normal primary age children. Some methods of sampling and analysing oral language were found to be of particular value. Of these the sentence repetition technique seems promising both as a research tool and as a classroom instrument for assessing individual children's language competence. The importance of this and similar research lies in its implications for educational programming.