Spatial or spatio-temporal data are frequently encountered in many scientific disciplines. One major challenge in modeling these processes is the high dimensionality of such data; that is, the number of observations is usually enormous. The first part of the dissertation proposes an efficient...

Recent calls for accountability have focused on scientifically based research that isolates causal mechanisms to inform both the policies and practices of education. A major challenge in aligning educational research with such standards has been to develop methods that can address the...

Government policies increasingly promote ethanol and other biofuels for security, air quality, and climate benefits. One chapter of this dissertation develops a model that links the distribution of preferences for ethanol to aggregate price responses and then estimates the model using data from...

Interviewer observations are an important source of auxiliary information in survey research. Interviewers can record observations for all units in a sample, and selected observations may be associated with both key survey variables and response propensity. Survey statisticians use auxiliary...

Genetic association studies are a powerful tool to detect genetic variants that predispose to human disease. Once an associated variant is identified, investigators are also interested in estimating the effect of the identified variant on disease risk. Estimates of the genetic effect based on...

Population-based case-control design has become one of the most popular approaches for conducting genome-wide association scans for rare diseases like cancer. In this article, we propose a novel method for improving the power of the widely used single-single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)...

A variety of sex allocation models is considered in which (i) the reproductive returns on investment in males differ from the returns on investment in females, (ii) the amounts of resources available for reproduction vary in the population, (iii) the costs of making male and female reproductive...

Unequal growth rates between mutant and wild-type cells in a large population constitute a problem for the estimation of mutation rate. Over a period of cell growth, a selective advantage of one cell type over the other might lead to considerable error in the estimation of mutation rate if equal...

The factors that affect reliable estimations of mutation rates ([mu]) in cultured mammalian somatic cell populations by fluctuation analysis are studied experimentally and statistically. We analyze the differential effect of the final cell population size in each culture (Nt) and the number of...