Numerical Solutions to PDEs (with Dr. Tom Lewis)
Numerical moment stabilization of central difference approximations for linear stationary reaction-convection-diffusion equations
Convergent Non-Monotone Finite Difference Methods for Approximating Viscosity Solutions of Stationary Hamilton-Jacobi Equations
Convergent Finite Difference Methods with Higher-Order Local Truncation Error for Hamilton-Jacobi Equations
Spatial Statistics (with Dr. Haimeng Zhang)
Asymptotics of covariance and variogram estimators for axially symmetric processes;
Empirical Bayesian Kriging (EBK) for estimation and prediction on the sphere;
Constructing covariance functions for axially symmetric processes on the sphere.
Mathematical Ecology and PDEs (with Dr. Ratnasingham Shivaji)
Effects of Harvesting Mediated Emigration on a Landscape Ecological Model;
Existence, multiplicity, uniqueness, and bifurcation results for positive steady states across various classes of reaction processes in reaction-diffusion equations.
Bayesian Statistics and Biostatistics (with Dr. Jim Norris)
Multi-Layer Hierarchical Bayesian Probabilistic Interaction Modeling With Informative Prior Probability for Gene Expression
Rigorous and expansive biological experiments of genes involve not only multiple replicates of sparse time data developed within a given laboratory but also, potentially, replicates generated by multiple laboratories. The posterior probability of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of our models of gene associations given the hierarchical time-course data is proportional to the product of the prior probability of the DAG and the likelihood of the data given the DAG. From such data modeling, protein or gene interaction posterior probabilities are computed based on hierarchical structures. A result based on multiple replicates in a single laboratory is developed first, then extended it to replicates from multiple laboratories. Rather than assuming equal priors for DAGs, three methods to estimate the prior probabilities of DAGs are presented. Their sensitivity based on different assumptions and additional information are discussed here. At the same time, the odds ratio of two estimates under the same setting are calculated. The odds ratio often has a much more concise form and is easier to apply in practical computations than the priors themselves.