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Fekadu L. Bayisa

Publications and source records attributed to Fekadu L. Bayisa.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Modeling Home Range and Intra-Specific Spatial Interaction in Wild Animal Populations

Interactions among individuals from the same-species of wild animals are an important component of population dynamics. An interaction can be either static (based on overlap of space use) or dynamic (based on movement). The goal of this work is to determine the level of static interactions between individuals from the same-species of wild animals using 95\% and 50\% home ranges, as well as to model their movement interactions, which could include attraction, avoidance (or repulsion), or lack of interaction, in order to gain new insights and improve our understanding of ecological processes. Home range estimation methods (minimum convex polygon, kernel density estimator, and autocorrelated kernel density estimator), inhomogeneous multitype (or cross-type) summary statistics, and envelope testing methods (pointwise and global envelope tests) were proposed to study the nature of the same-species wild-animal spatial interactions. This study provides comprehensive, self-contained methodological details for investigating spatial interactions between individuals of the same species in wildlife populations. Using GPS collar data, we applied the methods to quantify both static and dynamic interactions between black bears in southern Alabama, USA. In general, our findings suggest that the black bears in our dataset showed no significant preference to live together or apart, i.e., there was no significant deviation from independence toward association or avoidance (i.e., segregation) between the bears. This can be loosely interpreted to mean that a black bear is generally indifferent to the presence of other black bears living or wandering nearby.

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Spatial point process via regularisation modelling of ambulance call risk

This study investigates the spatial distribution of emergency alarm call events to identify spatial covariates associated with the events and discern hotspot regions for the events. The study is motivated by the problem of developing optimal dispatching strategies for prehospital resources such as ambulances. To achieve our goals, we model the spatially varying call occurrence risk as an intensity function of an inhomogeneous spatial Poisson process that we assume is a log-linear function of some underlying spatial covariates. The spatial covariates used in this study are related to road network coverage, population density, and the socio-economic status of the population in Skellefteå, Sweden. A new heuristic algorithm has been developed to select an optimal estimate of the kernel bandwidth in order to obtain the non-parametric intensity estimate of the events and to generate other covariates. Since we consider a large number of spatial covariates as well as their products, and since some of them may be strongly correlated, lasso-like elastic-net regularisation has been used in the log-likelihood intensity modeling to perform variable selection and reduce variance inflation from overfitting and bias from underfitting. As a result of the variable selection, the fitted model structure contains individual covariates of both road network and demographic types. We discovered that hotspot regions of calls have been observed along dense parts of the road network. Evaluation of the model also suggests that the estimated model is stable and can be used to generate a reliable intensity estimate over the region, which can be used as an input in the problem of designing prehospital resource dispatching strategies.

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Large-scale modelling and forecasting of ambulance calls in northern Sweden using spatio-temporal log-Gaussian Cox processes

Although ambulance call data typically come in the form of spatio-temporal point patterns, point process-based modelling approaches presented in the literature are scarce. In this paper, we study a unique set of Swedish spatio-temporal ambulance call data, which consist of the spatial (GPS) locations of the calls (within the four northernmost regions of Sweden) and the associated days of occurrence of the calls (January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2018). Motivated by the nature of the data, we here employ log-Gaussian Cox processes (LGCPs) for the spatio-temporal modelling and forecasting of the calls. To this end, we propose a K-means clustering based bandwidth selection method for the kernel estimation of the spatial component of the separable spatio-temporal intensity function. The temporal component of the intensity function is modelled using Poisson regression, using different calendar covariates, and the spatio-temporal random field component of the random intensity of the LGCP is fitted using the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm. Spatial hot-spots have been found in the south-eastern part of the study region, where most people in the region live and our fitted model/forecasts manage to capture this behavior quite well. Also, there is a significant association between the expected number of calls and the day-of-the-week and the season-of-the-year. A non-parametric second-order analysis indicates that LGCPs seem to be reasonable models for the data. Finally, we find that the fitted forecasts generate simulated future spatial event patterns that quite well resemble the actual future data.

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Model-based Computed Tomography Image Estimation: Partitioning Approach

There is a growing interest to get a fully MR based radiotherapy. The most important development needed is to obtain improved bone tissue estimation. The existing model-based methods perform poorly on bone tissues. This paper was aimed at obtaining improved bone tissue estimation. Skew Gaussian mixture model and Gaussian mixture model were proposed to investigate CT image estimation from MR images by partitioning the data into two major tissue types. The performance of the proposed models was evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation method on real data. In comparison with the existing model-based approaches, the model-based partitioning approach outperformed in bone tissue estimation, especially in dense bone tissue estimation.

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Adaptive Algorithm for Sparse Signal Recovery

Spike and slab priors play a key role in inducing sparsity for sparse signal recovery. The use of such priors results in hard non-convex and mixed integer programming problems. Most of the existing algorithms to solve the optimization problems involve either simplifying assumptions, relaxations or high computational expenses. We propose a new adaptive alternating direction method of multipliers (AADMM) algorithm to directly solve the presented optimization problem. The algorithm is based on the one-to-one mapping property of the support and non-zero element of the signal. At each step of the algorithm, we update the support by either adding an index to it or removing an index from it and use the alternating direction method of multipliers to recover the signal corresponding to the updated support. Experiments on synthetic data and real-world images show that the proposed AADMM algorithm provides superior performance and is computationally cheaper, compared to the recently developed iterative convex refinement (ICR) algorithm.

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Statistical Methods in Computed Tomography Image Estimation

Purpose: There is increasing interest in computed tomography (CT) image estimations from magnetic resonance (MR) images. The estimated CT images can be utilised for attenuation correction, patient positioning, and dose planning in diagnostic and radiotherapy workflows. This study aims to introduce a novel statistical learning approach for improving CT estimation from MR images and to compare the performance of our method with the existing model based CT image estimation methods. Methods: The statistical learning approach proposed here consists of two stages. At the training stage, prior knowledges about tissue-types from CT images were used together with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to explore CT image estimations from MR images. Since the prior knowledges are not available at the prediction stage, a classifier based on RUSBoost algorithm was trained to estimate the tissue-types from MR images. For a new patient, the trained classifier and GMMs were used to predict CT image from MR images. The classifier and GMMs were validated by using voxel level 10-fold cross-validation and patient-level leave-one-out cross-validation, respectively. Results: The proposed approach has outperformance in CT estimation quality in comparison with the existing model based methods, especially on bone tissues. Our method improved CT image estimation by 5% and 23% on the whole brain and bone tissues, respectively. Conclusions: Evaluation of our method shows that it is a promising method to generate CT image substitutes for the implementation of fully MR-based radiotherapy and PET/MRI applications.

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Comparison of hidden Markov chain models and hidden Markov random field models in estimation of computed tomography images

There is an interest to replace computed tomography (CT) images with magnetic resonance (MR) images for a number of diagnostic and therapeutic workflows. In this article, predicting CT images from a number of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences using regression approach is explored. Two principal areas of application for estimated CT images are dose calculations in MRI-based radiotherapy treatment planning and attenuation correction for positron emission tomography (PET)/MRI. The main purpose of this work is to investigate the performance of hidden Markov (chain) models (HMMs) in comparison to hidden Markov random field (HMRF) models when predicting CT images of head. Our study shows that HMMs have clear advantages over HMRF models in this particular application. Obtained results suggest that HMMs deserve a further study for investigating their potential in modelling applications where the most natural theoretical choice would be the class of HMRF models.

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