Statistical Methods for Trend Detection and Analysis in the Environmental Sciences


Book Description

The need to understand and quantify change is fundamental throughout the environmental sciences. This might involve describing past variation, understanding the mechanisms underlying observed changes, making projections of possible future change, or monitoring the effect of intervening in some environmental system. This book provides an overview of modern statistical techniques that may be relevant in problems of this nature. Practitioners studying environmental change will be familiar with many classical statistical procedures for the detection and estimation of trends. However, the ever increasing capacity to collect and process vast amounts of environmental information has led to growing awareness that such procedures are limited in the insights that they can deliver. At the same time, significant developments in statistical methodology have often been widely dispersed in the statistical literature and have therefore received limited exposure in the environmental science community. This book aims to provide a thorough but accessible review of these developments. It is split into two parts: the first provides an introduction to this area and the second part presents a collection of case studies illustrating the practical application of modern statistical approaches to the analysis of trends in real studies. Key Features: Presents a thorough introduction to the practical application and methodology of trend analysis in environmental science. Explores non-parametric estimation and testing as well as parametric techniques. Methods are illustrated using case studies from a variety of environmental application areas. Looks at trends in all aspects of a process including mean, percentiles and extremes. Supported by an accompanying website featuring datasets and R code. The book is designed to be accessible to readers with some basic statistical training, but also contains sufficient detail to serve as a reference for practising statisticians. It will therefore be of use to postgraduate students and researchers both in the environmental sciences and in statistics.




Statistical Trend Analysis of Physically Unclonable Functions


Book Description

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) translate unavoidable variations in certain parameters of materials, waves, or devices into random and unique signals. They have found many applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), authentication systems, FPGA industry, several other areas in communications and related technologies, and many commercial products. Statistical Trend Analysis of Physically Unclonable Functions first presents a review on cryptographic hardware and hardware-assisted cryptography. The review highlights PUF as a mega trend in research on cryptographic hardware design. Afterwards, the authors present a combined survey and research work on PUFs using a systematic approach. As part of the survey aspect, a state-of-the-art analysis is presented as well as a taxonomy on PUFs, a life cycle, and an established ecosystem for the technology. In another part of the survey, the evolutionary history of PUFs is examined, and strategies for further research in this area are suggested. In the research side, this book presents a novel approach for trend analysis that can be applied to any technology or research area. In this method, a text mining tool is used which extracts 1020 keywords from the titles of the sample papers. Then, a classifying tool classifies the keywords into 295 meaningful research topics. The popularity of each topic is then numerically measured and analyzed over the course of time through a statistical analysis on the number of research papers related to the topic as well as the number of their citations. The authors identify the most popular topics in four different domains; over the history of PUFs, during the recent years, in top conferences, and in top journals. The results are used to present an evolution study as well as a trend analysis and develop a roadmap for future research in this area. This method gives an automatic popularity-based statistical trend analysis which eliminates the need for passing personal judgments about the direction of trends, and provides concrete evidence to the future direction of research on PUFs. Another advantage of this method is the possibility of studying a whole lot of existing research works (more than 700 in this book). This book will appeal to researchers in text mining, cryptography, hardware security, and IoT.




Biological Data Mining And Its Applications In Healthcare


Book Description

Biologists are stepping up their efforts in understanding the biological processes that underlie disease pathways in the clinical contexts. This has resulted in a flood of biological and clinical data from genomic and protein sequences, DNA microarrays, protein interactions, biomedical images, to disease pathways and electronic health records. To exploit these data for discovering new knowledge that can be translated into clinical applications, there are fundamental data analysis difficulties that have to be overcome. Practical issues such as handling noisy and incomplete data, processing compute-intensive tasks, and integrating various data sources, are new challenges faced by biologists in the post-genome era. This book will cover the fundamentals of state-of-the-art data mining techniques which have been designed to handle such challenging data analysis problems, and demonstrate with real applications how biologists and clinical scientists can employ data mining to enable them to make meaningful observations and discoveries from a wide array of heterogeneous data from molecular biology to pharmaceutical and clinical domains.




Statistical Methods in Water Resources


Book Description

Data on water quality and other environmental issues are being collected at an ever-increasing rate. In the past, however, the techniques used by scientists to interpret this data have not progressed as quickly. This is a book of modern statistical methods for analysis of practical problems in water quality and water resources.The last fifteen years have seen major advances in the fields of exploratory data analysis (EDA) and robust statistical methods. The 'real-life' characteristics of environmental data tend to drive analysis towards the use of these methods. These advances are presented in a practical and relevant format. Alternate methods are compared, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each as applied to environmental data. Techniques for trend analysis and dealing with water below the detection limit are topics covered, which are of great interest to consultants in water-quality and hydrology, scientists in state, provincial and federal water resources, and geological survey agencies.The practising water resources scientist will find the worked examples using actual field data from case studies of environmental problems, of real value. Exercises at the end of each chapter enable the mechanics of the methodological process to be fully understood, with data sets included on diskette for easy use. The result is a book that is both up-to-date and immediately relevant to ongoing work in the environmental and water sciences.







Innovative Trend Methodologies in Science and Engineering


Book Description

This book covers all types of literature on existing trend analysis approaches, but more than 60% of the methodologies are developed here and some of them are reflected to scientific literature and others are also innovative versions, modifications or improvements. The suggested methodologies help to design, develop, manage and deliver scientific applications and training to meet the needs of interested staff in companies, industries and universities including students. Technical content and expertise are also provided from different theoretical and especially active roles in the design, development and delivery of science in particular and economics and business in general. It is also ensured that, wherever possible and technically appropriate, priority is given to the inclusion and integration of real life data, examples and processes within the book content. The time seems right, because available books just focus on special sectors (fashion, social, business). This book reviews all the available trend approaches in the present literature on rational and logical bases.




Methods and Applications of Longitudinal Data Analysis


Book Description

Methods and Applications of Longitudinal Data Analysis describes methods for the analysis of longitudinal data in the medical, biological and behavioral sciences. It introduces basic concepts and functions including a variety of regression models, and their practical applications across many areas of research. Statistical procedures featured within the text include: - descriptive methods for delineating trends over time - linear mixed regression models with both fixed and random effects - covariance pattern models on correlated errors - generalized estimating equations - nonlinear regression models for categorical repeated measurements - techniques for analyzing longitudinal data with non-ignorable missing observations Emphasis is given to applications of these methods, using substantial empirical illustrations, designed to help users of statistics better analyze and understand longitudinal data. Methods and Applications of Longitudinal Data Analysis equips both graduate students and professionals to confidently apply longitudinal data analysis to their particular discipline. It also provides a valuable reference source for applied statisticians, demographers and other quantitative methodologists. - From novice to professional: this book starts with the introduction of basic models and ends with the description of some of the most advanced models in longitudinal data analysis - Enables students to select the correct statistical methods to apply to their longitudinal data and avoid the pitfalls associated with incorrect selection - Identifies the limitations of classical repeated measures models and describes newly developed techniques, along with real-world examples.




Essential Statistics, Regression, and Econometrics


Book Description

Essential Statistics, Regression, and Econometrics, Second Edition, is innovative in its focus on preparing students for regression/econometrics, and in its extended emphasis on statistical reasoning, real data, pitfalls in data analysis, and modeling issues. This book is uncommonly approachable and easy to use, with extensive word problems that emphasize intuition and understanding. Too many students mistakenly believe that statistics courses are too abstract, mathematical, and tedious to be useful or interesting. To demonstrate the power, elegance, and even beauty of statistical reasoning, this book provides hundreds of new and updated interesting and relevant examples, and discusses not only the uses but also the abuses of statistics. The examples are drawn from many areas to show that statistical reasoning is not an irrelevant abstraction, but an important part of everyday life. - Includes hundreds of updated and new, real-world examples to engage students in the meaning and impact of statistics - Focuses on essential information to enable students to develop their own statistical reasoning - Ideal for one-quarter or one-semester courses taught in economics, business, finance, politics, sociology, and psychology departments, as well as in law and medical schools - Accompanied by an ancillary website with an instructors solutions manual, student solutions manual and supplementing chapters




Statistical Analysis with Missing Data


Book Description

An up-to-date, comprehensive treatment of a classic text on missing data in statistics The topic of missing data has gained considerable attention in recent decades. This new edition by two acknowledged experts on the subject offers an up-to-date account of practical methodology for handling missing data problems. Blending theory and application, authors Roderick Little and Donald Rubin review historical approaches to the subject and describe simple methods for multivariate analysis with missing values. They then provide a coherent theory for analysis of problems based on likelihoods derived from statistical models for the data and the missing data mechanism, and then they apply the theory to a wide range of important missing data problems. Statistical Analysis with Missing Data, Third Edition starts by introducing readers to the subject and approaches toward solving it. It looks at the patterns and mechanisms that create the missing data, as well as a taxonomy of missing data. It then goes on to examine missing data in experiments, before discussing complete-case and available-case analysis, including weighting methods. The new edition expands its coverage to include recent work on topics such as nonresponse in sample surveys, causal inference, diagnostic methods, and sensitivity analysis, among a host of other topics. An updated “classic” written by renowned authorities on the subject Features over 150 exercises (including many new ones) Covers recent work on important methods like multiple imputation, robust alternatives to weighting, and Bayesian methods Revises previous topics based on past student feedback and class experience Contains an updated and expanded bibliography The authors were awarded The Karl Pearson Prize in 2017 by the International Statistical Institute, for a research contribution that has had profound influence on statistical theory, methodology or applications. Their work "has been no less than defining and transforming." (ISI) Statistical Analysis with Missing Data, Third Edition is an ideal textbook for upper undergraduate and/or beginning graduate level students of the subject. It is also an excellent source of information for applied statisticians and practitioners in government and industry.




Statistical Analysis of Network Data


Book Description

In recent years there has been an explosion of network data – that is, measu- ments that are either of or from a system conceptualized as a network – from se- ingly all corners of science. The combination of an increasingly pervasive interest in scienti c analysis at a systems level and the ever-growing capabilities for hi- throughput data collection in various elds has fueled this trend. Researchers from biology and bioinformatics to physics, from computer science to the information sciences, and from economics to sociology are more and more engaged in the c- lection and statistical analysis of data from a network-centric perspective. Accordingly, the contributions to statistical methods and modeling in this area have come from a similarly broad spectrum of areas, often independently of each other. Many books already have been written addressing network data and network problems in speci c individual disciplines. However, there is at present no single book that provides a modern treatment of a core body of knowledge for statistical analysis of network data that cuts across the various disciplines and is organized rather according to a statistical taxonomy of tasks and techniques. This book seeks to ll that gap and, as such, it aims to contribute to a growing trend in recent years to facilitate the exchange of knowledge across the pre-existing boundaries between those disciplines that play a role in what is coming to be called ‘network science.