Edward Y. Chow and Alan S. Willsky. / "February 14, 1983." / Bibliography: p. 37-38. / Office of Naval Research Contract No. N00014-77-C-0224 NASA Ames Research Grant No. NGL-22-009-124

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008. / Title from title screen (site viewed Feb. 17, 2009). PDF text: x, 145 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 2 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3331439. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

In this thesis, we consider a Bayesian bi-level variable selection problem in high-dimensional regressions. In many practical situations, it is natural to assign group membership to each predictor. Examples include that genetic variants can be grouped at the gene level and a covariate from different tasks naturally forms a group. Thus, it is of interest to select important groups as well as important members from those groups. The existing methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are often computationally intensive and not scalable to large data sets. To address this problem, we consider variational inference for bi-level variable selection (BIVAS). In contrast to the commonly used mean-field approximation, we propose a hierarchical factorization to approximate the posterior distribution, by utilizing the structure of bi-level variable selection. Moreover, we develop a computationally efficient and fully parallelizable algorithm based on this variational approximation. We further extend the developed method to model data sets from multi-task learning. The comprehensive numerical results from both simulation studies and real data analysis demonstrate the advantages of BIVAS for variable selection, parameter estimation and computational efficiency over existing methods. The BIVAS software with support of parallelization is implemented in R package `bivas' available at https://github.com/mxcai/bivas.

The elderly living in smart homes can have their daily movement recorded and analyzed. Given the fact that different elders can have their own living habits, a methodology that can automatically identify their daily activities and discover their daily routines will be useful for better elderly care and support. In this thesis research, we focus on developing data mining algorithms for automatic detection of behavioral patterns from the trajectory data of an individual for activity identification, daily routine discovery, and activity prediction. The key challenges for the human activity analysis include the need to consider longer-range dependency of the sensor triggering events for activity modeling and to capture the spatio-temporal variations of the behavioral patterns exhibited by human. We propose to represent the trajectory data using a behavior-aware flow graph which is a probabilistic finite state automaton with its nodes and edges attributed with some local behavior-aware features. Subflows can then be extracted from the flow graph using the kernel k-means as the underlying behavioral patterns for activity identification. Given the identified activities, we propose a novel nominal matrix factorization method under a Bayesian framework with Lasso to extract highly interpretable daily routines. To better take care of the variations of activity durations within each daily routine, we further extend the Bayesian framework with a Markov jump process as the prior to incorporate the shift-invariant property into the model. For empirical evaluation, the proposed methodologies have been compared with a number of existing activity identification and daily routine discovery methods based on both synthetic and publicly available real smart home data sets with promising results obtained. In the thesis, we also illustrate how the proposed unsupervised methodology could be used to support exploratory behavior analysis for elderly care.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The secondary structure of proteins is predicted using various binary classifiers. The data are adopted from the RS126 database. The original data consists of protein primary and secondary structure sequences. The original data is encoded using alphabetic letters. These data are encoded into unary vectors comprising ones and zeros only. Different binary classifiers, namely the naive Bayes, logistic regression and classification trees using hold-out and 5-fold cross validation are trained using the encoded data. For each of the classifiers three classification tasks are considered, namely helix against not helix (H/∼H), sheet against not sheet (S/∼S) and coil against not coil (C/∼C). The performance of these binary classifiers are compared using the overall accuracy in predicting the protein secondary structure for various window sizes. Our result indicate that hold-out cross validation achieved higher accuracy than 5-fold cross validation. The Naive Bayes classifier, using 5-fold cross validation achieved, the lowest accuracy for predicting helix against not helix. The classification tree classifiers, using 5-fold cross validation, achieved the lowest accuracies for both coil against not coil and sheet against not sheet classifications. The logistic regression classier accuracy is dependent on the window size; there is a positive relationship between the accuracy and window size. The logistic regression classier approach achieved the highest accuracy when compared to the classification tree and Naive Bayes classifiers for each classification task; predicting helix against not helix with accuracy 77.74 percent, for sheet against not sheet with accuracy 81.22 percent and for coil against not coil with accuracy 73.39 percent. It is noted that it is easier to compare classifiers if the classification process could be completely facilitated in R. Alternatively, it would be easier to assess these logistic regression classifiers if SPSS had a function to determine the accuracy of the logistic regression classifier.

Extreme event populations are encountered in all domains of civil engineering. The classical and Bayesian statistical approaches for describing these populations are described and compared. Bayesian frameworks applied to such populations are reviewed and critiqued. The present Bayesian framework is explained from both theoretical and computational points of view. Engineering judgement and regional analyses can be used to yield a distribution on a parameter set describing a population of extremes. Extraordinary order events, as well as known data, can be used to update the prior parameter distribution through Bayes theorem. The resulting posterior distribution is used to form a compound distribution, the basis for estimation. Quantile distributions are developed as are linear transformations of the parameters. Examples from several domains of civil engineering illustrate the flexibility of the computer program which implements the present method. Suggestions are made for further research. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Civil Engineering, Department of / Graduate

Poisson process is a common model for count data. However, a global Poisson model is inadequate for sparse data such as the marked salmon recovery data that have huge extraneous variations and noise. An empirical Bayes model, which enables information to be aggregated to overcome the lack of information from data in individual cells, is thus developed to handle these data. The method fits a local parametric Poisson model to describe the variation at each sampling period and incorporates this approach with a conventional local smoothing technique to remove noise. Finally, the overdispersion relative to the Poisson model is modelled by mixing these locally smoothed, Poisson models in an appropriate way. This method is then applied to the marked salmon data to obtain the overall patterns and the corresponding credibility intervals for the underlying trend in the data. / Science, Faculty of / Statistics, Department of / Graduate

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