Forest ecosystems are among the largest terrestrial carbon reservoirs on our planet earth thus playing a vital role in global carbon cycle. Presently, remote sensing techniques provide proper estimates of forest biomass and quantify carbon stocks. The present study has explored Landsat-8 sensor product and evaluated its application in biomass mapping and estimation. The specific objectives were...

ii c 2013 Yi Liu ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii ABSTRACT YI LIU. Generalized Quasi-Likelihood Ratio Statistics for Multivariate Time-varying Coefficient Regression Models. (Under the direction of DR. JIANCHENG JIANG) Generalized likelihood ratio statistics have been a generally applicable method for testing nonparametric hypotheses about nonparametric functions.It has been widely used in many research...

This paper analyzes the determinants of multilateral aid from international financial institutions (IFIs) to Pakistan, focusing on the world three major IFIs, the World Bank, the IMF and the ADB. Political economic factors, notably bureaucratic interests and major shareholders economic interests, are suspected to be relevant in international aid allocation decisions. Pooled Tobit estimation ana...

The successful development of an optimal canopy vegetation index dynamic model for obtaining higher yield can offer a technical approach for real-time and nondestructive diagnosis of rice (Oryza sativa L) growth and nitrogen (N) nutrition status. In this study, multiple rice cultivars and N treatments of experimental plots were carried out to obtain: normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI...

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a common disease among youngsters and self-efficacy is a crucial factor in these patients. Various variables, including demographic characteristics and disease symptoms, affect self-efficacy. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the relationship between these factors using a clear and comprehensive model. Aim: this s...

Model selection has, in the last decade, undergone rapid growth for evaluating models of cognitive processes, ever since its introduction to the mathematical/cognitive psychology community (Myung, Forster, & Browne, 2000). The term “model selection” refers to the task of selecting, among several competing alternatives, the “best” statistical model given experimental data. To avoid ambiguity, “b...

Historical documents frequently exhibit extensive orthographic variation, including archaic spellings and obsolete shorthand. OCR tools typically seek to produce so-called diplomatic transcriptions that preserve these variants, but many end tasks require transcriptions with normalized orthography. In this paper, we present a novel joint transcription model that learns, unsupervised, a probabili...

We discuss several criteria for clustering graphs, and identify two criteria which are not biased towards certain cluster sizes: the node-normalized cut (also called cut ratio) and the edge-normalized cut. We present two energy models whose minimum energy drawings reveal clusters with respect to these criteria. The energy model that corresponds to the edge-normalized cut differs from the other ...