This study focused on identifying factors that significantly affect the potentially insolvent status of life insurers. The potentially insolvent status is indicated based on insurer’s Risk-based capital ratio (RBC ratio) reported in the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)...

In public health research, it is common to follow a cohort of subjects over time, observing a vector of health indicators and a set of covariates at each of many visits. An objective of analysis is to characterize the inter-dependencies, in particular, the feedback of one response upon another...

Hierarchical or "multilevel" regression models typically parameterize the mean response conditional on unobserved latent variables or "random" effects and then make simple assumptions regarding their distribution. The interpretation of a regression parameter in such a model is the change in...

This research endeavor consisted of two distinct efforts. First, following a literature review of the characteristics, objectives, and incentive programs available to nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners, the potential effects of wood chip mill harvests on forest management practices...

This study used selected student record data to investigate the effect of students? characteristics prior to university admission (pre-admission variables), and academic actions and educational achievement indicators (post-admission variables) on retention in higher education. The analysis...

Over the last decade there has been growing interest in pool-based active learning techniques, where instead of receiving an i.i.d. sample from a pool of unlabeled data, a learner may take an active role in selecting examples from the pool. Queries to an oracle (a human annotator in most...

This thesis focuses on two statistical problems related to credit scoring. In credit scoring of individuals, two classes are distinguished, namely low and high risk individuals (the so-called "good" and "bad" risk classes). Firstly, we suggest a measure which may be used to study the nature of a...

South African Air Quality Units are continuously undergoing changes, andimproving their performance remains a constant endeavour. In addition, theseunits are also experiencing several challenges in terms of improvingcommunication across the different spheres, accessing air quality data and...

Traffic from major hurricane evacuations is known to cause severe gridlocks on evacuation routes. Better prediction of the expected amount of evacuation traffic is needed to improve the decision-making process for the required evacuation routes and possible deployment of special traffic...

This two-part paper presents the development of an improved airport risk assessmentmethodology aimed at assessing risks related to aircraft accidents at and in the vicinityof airports and managing Airport Safety Areas (ASAs) as a risk mitigation measure.The improved methodology is more...