arXiv subjects

Elizabeth Upton

Publications and source records attributed to Elizabeth Upton.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

The Software Behind the Stats: A Student Exploration of Software Trends Across Disciplines

This paper presents a student-led activity designed to explore the use of statistical software in academic research across economics, political science, and statistics. Students reviewed replication files from major journals and repositories, gaining hands-on experience with reproducible workflows while contributing to cross-disciplinary datasets. Web-scraped metadata and student data collection, together covering more than 10,000 papers, reveal clear disciplinary patterns: Stata remains dominant in economics, while R is increasingly popular in political science and is the standard in statistics. Within the social sciences, a growing number of articles also use multiple software platforms within a single manuscript. Students reported increased understanding of academic workflows and greater awareness of software diversity in quantitative research. The activity is easy to adapt across course levels and disciplines, and we offer suggestions for follow-up assignments that reinforce key concepts in reproducibility and data fluency. The resulting insights into current software practices are also valuable for instructors seeking to align their teaching with evolving trends in research.

stat.OT↗

arXiv2024

Improving and Evaluating Machine Learning Methods for Forensic Shoeprint Matching

We propose a machine learning pipeline for forensic shoeprint pattern matching that improves on the accuracy and generalisability of existing methods. We extract 2D coordinates from shoeprint scans using edge detection and align the two shoeprints with iterative closest point (ICP). We then extract similarity metrics to quantify how well the two prints match and use these metrics to train a random forest that generates a probabilistic measurement of how likely two prints are to have originated from the same outsole. We assess the generalisability of machine learning methods trained on lab shoeprint scans to more realistic crime scene shoeprint data by evaluating the accuracy of our methods on several shoeprint scenarios: partial prints, prints with varying levels of blurriness, prints with different amounts of wear, and prints from different shoe models. We find that models trained on one type of shoeprint yield extremely high levels of accuracy when tested on shoeprint pairs of the same scenario but fail to generalise to other scenarios. We also discover that models trained on a variety of scenarios predict almost as accurately as models trained on specific scenarios.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Bayesian Network Regularized Regression for Modeling Urban Crime Occurrences

Analyses of occurrences of residential burglary in urban areas have shown that crime rates are not spatially homogeneous: rates vary across the network of city streets, resulting in some areas being far more susceptible to crime than others. The explanation for why a certain segment of the city experiences high crime may be different than why a neighboring area experiences high crime. Motivated by the importance of understanding spatial patterns such as these, we consider a statistical model of burglary defined on the street network of Boston, Massachusetts. Leveraging ideas from functional data analysis, our proposed solution consists of a generalized linear model with vertex-indexed covariates, allowing for an interpretation of the covariate effects at the street level. We employ a regularization procedure cast as a prior distribution on the regression coefficients under a Bayesian setup, so that the predicted responses vary smoothly according to the connectivity of the city. We introduce a novel variable selection procedure, examine computationally efficient methods for sampling from the posterior distribution of the model parameters, and demonstrate the flexibility of our proposed modeling structure. The resulting model and interpretations provide insight into the spatial network patterns and dynamics of residential burglary in Boston.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

Hypergraph adjusted plus-minus

In team sports, traditional ranking statistics do not allow for the simultaneous evaluation of both individuals and combinations of players. Metrics for individual player rankings often fail to include the interaction effects between groups of players, while methods for assessing full lineups cannot be used to identify the value of lower-order combinations of players (pairs, trios, etc.). Given that player and lineup rankings are inherently dependent on each other, these limitations may affect the accuracy of performance evaluations. To address this, we propose a novel adjusted plus-minus (APM) approach that allows for the simultaneous ranking of individual players, lower-order combinations of players, and full lineups within a team. The method adjusts for the complete dependency structure and is motivated by the connection between APM and the hypergraph representation of a team. We discuss the similarities of our approach to other advanced metrics, demonstrate it using NBA data from 2012-2022, and suggest potential directions for future work.

stat.ME↗