Purpose: Course evaluations are formative and are used to evaluate learnings of the students for a course. Anomalies in the evaluation process can lead to a faulty educational outcome. Learning analytics and educational data mining provide a set of techniques that can be conveniently applied to extensive data collected as part of the evaluation…

The various empirical models built for enrollment management, operations, and program evaluation purposes may have lost their predictive power as a result of the recent collective impact of COVID restrictions, widespread social upheaval, and the shift in educational preferences. This statistical artifact is known as model drifting, data-shift,…

A Monte Carlo simulation was performed to compare methods for handling missing data in growth mixture models. The methods considered in the current study were (a) a fully Bayesian approach using a Gibbs sampler, (b) full information maximum likelihood using the expectation-maximization algorithm, (c) multiple imputation, (d) a two-stage multiple…

Categorical data become increasingly ubiquitous in the modern big data era. In this dissertation, we propose novel statistical learning and inference methods for large-scale categorical data, focusing on latent variable models and their applications to psychometrics. In psychometric assessments, the subjects' underlying aptitude often cannot be…

This study shows that residual variation can cause problems related to scaling in exponential random graph models (ERGM). Residual variation is likely to exist when there are unmeasured variables in a model--even those uncorrelated with other predictors--or when the logistic form of the model is inappropriate. As a consequence, coefficients cannot…