Variability enters ecological systems at many different levels, from the differences between organisms and their individual life histories, to differences in the species composition of communities and changes in the external environment. Incorporating this variability into models, or accounting...

A stochastic dynamic programming model is presented for decision-making by the manager of a small rhino reserve facing a poaching threat, with the objective of maximizing the rhino population size in the long term. The manager decides annually what proportion of the budget to spend on dehorning...

Background: Tight clustering arose recently from a desire to obtain tighter and potentially more informative clusters in gene expression studies. Scattered genes with relatively loose correlations should be excluded from the clusters. However, in the literature there is little work dedicated to...

Dynamic models, also termed state space models, comprise an extremely rich model class for time series analysis. This dissertation focuses on building state space models for a variety of contexts and computationally efficient methods for Bayesian inference for simultaneous estimation of latent...

The random field model has been applied to model spatial heterogeneity for spatial data in many applications. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore statistical properties of noisy spatial data through estimation of the Gaussian random field. Large sample properties of the Maximum...

This dissertation links the natural and social sciences, using modeling techniques to enhance understanding of the functioning of a complex ecosystem and its relevance to humans. For this purpose, I developed a Regional Unified Metatomodel of the Brazilian Amazon (RUMBA) to simulate the Amazon...

The allocation of limited resources to competing body parts during development may affect both the absolute and relative sizes of physical traits, creating potentially dramatic consequences for the evolution of morphology. While negative correlations between the sizes of body parts...

Vaccine development represents a special case where historically, public health priorities are central. Trends of privatization have increased the role played by pharmaceutical and biotech companies in developing new biomedical technologies. As the innovative science behind new medical...

The automatic collection and increasing availability of health data provides a new opportunity for techniques to monitor this information. By monitoring pre-diagnostic data sources, such as over-the-counter cough medicine sales or emergency room chief complaints of cough, there exists the...

Survival times for the Acacia mangium plantation in the Segaliud Lokan Project, Sabah, East Malaysia were analysed based on 20 permanent sample plots (PSPs) established in 1988 as a spacing experiment. The PSPs were established following a complete randomized block design with five levels of...