The integration of low-pressure membrane filtration and aerobic granular sludge (AGS) reactor leads to a novel environmental biotechnological process with strong potential to overcome membrane fouling and demonstrate excellent wastewater treatment performance. However, membrane fouling mechanisms in the AGS based membrane bioreactor (MBR) are lack of systematic elaboration. In the...
Local signal detection is useful in many scientific areas such as imaging processing and speech recognition, for extracting meaningful patterns from noisy signals. In this dissertation, we study estimation and local signal detection for spatial data distributed over irregular domains. In particular, we use bivariate splines defined on triangulations to...
In areas such as spatial analysis and time series analysis, it is essential to understand and quantify spatial or temporal heterogeneity. In this dissertation, we focus on a spatially varying coefficient model, in which spatial heterogeneity is accommodated by allowing the regression coefficients to vary in a given spatial domain....
We consider two semiparametric regression models for data analysis, the stochastic additive model (SAM) for nonlinear time series data and the additive coefficient model (ACM) for randomly sampled data with nonparametric structure. We employ the SCAD-penalized polynomial spline estimation method for estimation and simultaneous variable selection in both models. It...
Monotone additive models are useful in estimating productivity curves or analyzing disease risk where the predictors are known to have monotonic effects on the response. Existing literature mainly focuses on univariate monotone smoothing. Available methods for the estimation of monotone additive models are either difficult to interpret or have no...
The growing global interest in traceability in supply chains has resulted in a variety of public policy and private sector initiatives in numerous countries. It is widely accepted in developed countries that whole chain traceability of food - from inputs, treatments, processing and packaging distribution and marketing - is absolutely...
Biological hydrogen production from renewable feedstocks was reckoned as a promising method for sustainable energy production. Bioelectrochemical hydrogen production using microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) demonstrated superiorities over the conventional methods for hydrogen production. The introduction of the membrane-less single chamber design further improved the feasibility of MECs for practical application,...
Diffusion processes in networks are common models for many domains, including species colonization, information/idea cascade, disease propagation and fire spreading. In diffusion networks, a diffusion event occurs when a behavior spreads from one node to the other following a probabilistic model, where the behavior could be species, an idea, a...
China accounted for over 8 percent of world exports by value in fish and shellfish in 2002. Over the period 1998-2002 it rose from 4th to 2nd largest amongst exporting countries. Yet, there has been surprisingly little analysis of the trading performance and international competitiveness of China in world fish...
Wheat sharp eyespot (SES), caused by the soil-borne fungus Rhizoctonia cerealis is a common stem disease of wheat globally. The disease caused a severe and extensive epidemic throughout the Willamette Valley of Oregon in 2014 and has remained one of the most important wheat diseases in this region. However, litte...