Interdisciplinary research in computer science requires the development of computational techniques for practical application in different domains. This usually requires careful integration of different areas of technical expertise. This dissertation presents image and time series analysis algorithms, with practical interdisciplinary applications…

The current Situational Space Awareness (SSA) is faced with a huge task of tracking the increasing number of space objects. The tracking of space objects requires frequent and accurate monitoring for orbit maintenance and collision avoidance using methods for statistical orbit determination. Statistical orbit determination enables us to obtain…

Most evaluations of education policies focus on their mean impacts; when distributional effects are investigated it is usually by comparing mean impacts across demographic subgroups. We argue that such estimates may overlook important treatment effect heterogeneity; in order to appreciate the full extent of a policy's distributional impacts one…

The authors present a generalization of the multiple-group bifactor model that extends the classical bifactor model for categorical outcomes by relaxing the typical assumption of independence of the specific dimensions. In addition to the means and variances of all dimensions, the correlations among the specific dimensions are allowed to differ…

Computational aesthetics is a relatively new subfield of artificial intelligence (AI). It includes research that enables computers to "recognize" (and evaluate) beauty in various domains such as visual art, music, and games. Aside from the benefit this gives to humans in terms of creating and appreciating art in these domains, there are perhaps…

"E"-pH (Pourbaix) diagrams provide an important graphical link between the thermodynamic calculations of potential, pH, equilibrium constant, concentration, and changes in Gibbs energy and the experimentally observed behavior of species in aqueous solutions. The utility of "E"-pH diagrams is extended with the introduction of an additional…

A general systematic approach including ionic strength effects is proposed for the numerical calculation of concentrations of chemical species in multiequilibrium problems. This approach extends the versatility of the approach presented in a previous article and is applied using the Solver option of the Excel spreadsheet to solve real problems…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

Hierarchical or multilevel linear models are widely used for longitudinal or cross-sectional data on students nested in classes and schools, and are particularly important for estimating treatment effects in cluster-randomized trials, multi-site trials, and meta-analyses. The models can allow for variation in treatment effects, as well as…

While the question of how to use human knowledge to guide evolutionary search is long-recognized, much remains to be done to answer this question adequately. This dissertation aims to further answer this question by exploring the role of domain knowledge in evolutionary computation as applied to real-world, complex problems, such as financial…

For decades software managers have been using formal methodologies such as the Constructive Cost Model and Function Points to estimate the effort of software projects during the early stages of project development. While some research shows these methodologies to be effective, many software managers feel that they are overly complicated to use and…

Researchers in the single-case design tradition have debated the size and importance of the observed autocorrelations in those designs. All of the past estimates of the autocorrelation in that literature have taken the observed autocorrelation estimates as the data to be used in the debate. However, estimates of the autocorrelation are subject to…

This article presents a method for evaluating equating results. Within the kernel equating framework, the percent relative error (PRE) for chained equipercentile equating was computed under the nonequivalent groups with anchor test (NEAT) design. The method was applied to two data sets to obtain the PRE, which can be used to measure equating…

We describe the calculation of the distribution of the sum of signed ranks and develop an exact recursive algorithm for the distribution as well as an approximation of the distribution using the normal. The results have applications to the non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Endress and Mehler (2009) reported that when adult subjects are exposed to an unsegmented artificial language composed from trisyllabic words such as ABX, YBC, and AZC, they are unable to distinguish between these words and what they coined as the "phantom-word" ABC in a subsequent test. This suggests that statistical learning generates knowledge…