Aquatic fecal contamination from non-point sources impairs environmental health and serves as a vehicle for transmission of waterborne disease, resulting in economic losses worldwide. Accurate methods of diagnosing fecal pollution and its source are needed to prevent human exposure, remediate pollution, and reduce economic impacts. In order to obtain this...
Humans are remarkably efficient in learning by interacting with other people and observing their behavior. Children learn by watching their parents’ actions and mimic their behavior. When they are not sure about their parents demonstration, they communicate with them, ask questions, and learn from their feedback. On the other hand,...
Population trends and patterns in species distributions are the major currencies used to examine responses by biodiversity to changing environments. Effective conservation recommendations require that models of both distribution dynamics and population trends accurately reflect reality. However, identification of the appropriate temporal and spatial scales of animal response, and then...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) samples report elevated rates of substance use and substance use disorder compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts across a wide variety of substances (Connolly & Gilchrist, 2020; Krueger et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2019), in part due to the experience of minority stress....
Diverse scientific fields collect multiple time series data to investigate the dynamical behavior of complex systems: atmospheric and climate science, geophysics, neuroscience, epidemiology, ecology, and environmental science. Identifying patterns of mutual dependence among such data generates valuable knowledge that can be applied either for inferential or forecasting purposes. Vector autoregressive...
Anomaly detection is the task of identifying observations (points) that differ from the majority of other points, which requires some measure of difference, or distance. Many anomaly detection methods rely on “implicit distance” measures: rather than directly calculating an explicitly defined distance, these approaches quantify a point’s “abnormality” by examining...
Due to recent advances in computer technology, the cost of collecting and storing data has dropped drastically. This makes it feasible to collect large amounts of information for each data point. This increasing trend in feature dimensionality justifies the need for research on variable selection. Random forest (RF) has demonstrated...
Bayesian optimization (BO) aims to optimize costly-to-evaluate functions by running a limited number of experiments that each evaluates the function at a selected input. Typical BO formulations assume that experiments are selected sequentially, or in fixed batches. Moreover, these experiments can be executed immediately upon request and have the same...
Randomized trials are the gold standard for the clinical assessment of a new treatment
compared to a placebo or standard of care. Often in clinical trials, patients are
accrued sequentially rather than all at once. Thus, the data from such a trial becomes
available sequentially to the researcher. Monitoring and...
The influence of the physical environment on organisms has long been a subject of ecological research. But, the complex drivers of environmental variation, and the multiple scales at which this can occur, make studying this topic a difficult challenge. In rocky intertidal habitats, oceanographic- and climate-scale variability influence benthic communities...