In this work, we introduce a novel oversampling technique, the theory of inheritance and Gower distance-based oversampling (TIGO) method, designed to address class imbalance issues in mixed categorical and continuous variables data set. Drawing inspiration from genetic inheritance principles, TIGO synthesizes new minority class data,…

Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) has been widely used in educational and psychological assessments. It estimates multiple constructs simultaneously and models the correlations among latent constructs. While it provides more accurate results, the unidimensional IRT model is still dominant in real applications. One major reason is that…

Data are everywhere. Data collected from samples are often reported in the form of polls, medical studies, and advertisement information and an understanding of sampling distributions and statistical inference is important for evaluating data-based claims (Bargagliotti et al., 2020). Despite the importance of understanding statistical inference…

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for enhanced outbreak preparedness against viruses. Key elements to this preparedness are robust disease surveillance systems and effective interventions to minimize disease transmission. While individual clinical testing is the conventional disease surveillance approach, environmental…

Many education researchers have advocated grounding abstract mathematical and scientific concepts in students' lived experiences, environmental interactions, and perceptions. This dissertation explores the causal effects of various grounding strategies in instructional settings, specifically on the topic of statistical sampling. The first chapter…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…