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Nikhil Fernandes

Publications and source records attributed to Nikhil Fernandes.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Constraining dark energy models using Jackknife and Bootstrap resampling

Analyses of type Ia supernovae have helped us shed light on the existence and nature of dark energy. Most of these analyses have relied on Bayesian techniques. In this work, we employ resampling techniques, namely Jackknife and Bootstrap, together with generalised least squares, to analyse supernova data. We first calibrate these techniques using near-ideal mock data and versions of the PantheonPlus data, and compare their performance with Bayesian methods. We find that with near-ideal mock data, Jackknife can yield better constraints. We then apply these methods to constrain parameters of flat $\Lambda$CDM, $\Lambda$CDM, flat $w$CDM, $w$CDM, and flat $w_0\,w_a$CDM models from the PantheonPlus and SH0ES (PPS) data. We observe that constraints obtained with different techniques for three- and four-parameter models are largely consistent. We also find that the Hubble tension is less significant with constraints from the Jackknife. For instance, we find that Jackknife estimates $h\,=\,0.743\,\pm\,0.029$ from PPS data, making the Planck value well within $3\sigma$. Moreover, we estimate $h\,=\,0.678\,\pm\,0.052$ from PantheonPlus data when we only consider sources with $z > 0.01$, in which case there is no tension with the Planck estimate. These results highlight the importance of using multiple techniques while analysing data and warrant further investigation.

astro-ph.CO

The Influence of Domain-Based Preprocessing on Subject-Specific Clustering

The sudden change of moving the majority of teaching online at Universities due to the global Covid-19 pandemic has caused an increased amount of workload for academics. One of the contributing factors is answering a high volume of queries coming from students. As these queries are not limited to the synchronous time frame of a lecture, there is a high chance of many of them being related or even equivalent. One way to deal with this problem is to cluster these questions depending on their topic. In our previous work, we aimed to find an improved method of clustering that would give us a high efficiency, using a recurring LDA model. Our data set contained questions posted online from a Computer Science course at the University of Bath. A significant number of these questions contained code excerpts, which we found caused a problem in clustering, as certain terms were being considered as common words in the English language and not being recognised as specific code terms. To address this, we implemented tagging of these technical terms using Python, as part of preprocessing the data set. In this paper, we explore the realms of tagging data sets, focusing on identifying code excerpts and providing empirical results in order to justify our reasoning.

cs.LG

Unification of HDP and LDA Models for Optimal Topic Clustering of Subject Specific Question Banks

There has been an increasingly popular trend in Universities for curriculum transformation to make teaching more interactive and suitable for online courses. An increase in the popularity of online courses would result in an increase in the number of course-related queries for academics. This, coupled with the fact that if lectures were delivered in a video on demand format, there would be no fixed time where the majority of students could ask questions. When questions are asked in a lecture there is a negligible chance of having similar questions repeatedly, but asynchronously this is more likely. In order to reduce the time spent on answering each individual question, clustering them is an ideal choice. There are different unsupervised models fit for text clustering, of which the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model is the most commonly used. We use the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process to determine an optimal topic number input for our LDA model runs. Due to the probabilistic nature of these topic models, the outputs of them vary for different runs. The general trend we found is that not all the topics were being used for clustering on the first run of the LDA model, which results in a less effective clustering. To tackle probabilistic output, we recursively use the LDA model on the effective topics being used until we obtain an efficiency ratio of 1. Through our experimental results we also establish a reasoning on how Zeno's paradox is avoided.

cs.IR