Matching Items (72)
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Description
Solution methods for certain linear and nonlinear evolution equations are presented in this dissertation. Emphasis is placed mainly on the analytical treatment of nonautonomous differential equations, which are challenging to solve despite the existent numerical and symbolic computational software programs available. Ideas from the transformation theory are adopted allowing one

Solution methods for certain linear and nonlinear evolution equations are presented in this dissertation. Emphasis is placed mainly on the analytical treatment of nonautonomous differential equations, which are challenging to solve despite the existent numerical and symbolic computational software programs available. Ideas from the transformation theory are adopted allowing one to solve the problems under consideration from a non-traditional perspective. First, the Cauchy initial value problem is considered for a class of nonautonomous and inhomogeneous linear diffusion-type equation on the entire real line. Explicit transformations are used to reduce the equations under study to their corresponding standard forms emphasizing on natural relations with certain Riccati(and/or Ermakov)-type systems. These relations give solvability results for the Cauchy problem of the parabolic equation considered. The superposition principle allows to solve formally this problem from an unconventional point of view. An eigenfunction expansion approach is also considered for this general evolution equation. Examples considered to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed solution methods include the Fokker-Planck equation, the Black-Scholes model and the one-factor Gaussian Hull-White model. The results obtained in the first part are used to solve the Cauchy initial value problem for certain inhomogeneous Burgers-type equation. The connection between linear (the Diffusion-type) and nonlinear (Burgers-type) parabolic equations is stress in order to establish a strong commutative relation. Traveling wave solutions of a nonautonomous Burgers equation are also investigated. Finally, it is constructed explicitly the minimum-uncertainty squeezed states for quantum harmonic oscillators. They are derived by the action of corresponding maximal kinematical invariance group on the standard ground state solution. It is shown that the product of the variances attains the required minimum value only at the instances that one variance is a minimum and the other is a maximum, when the squeezing of one of the variances occurs. Such explicit construction is possible due to the relation between the diffusion-type equation studied in the first part and the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. A modication of the radiation field operators for squeezed photons in a perfect cavity is also suggested with the help of a nonstandard solution of Heisenberg's equation of motion.
ContributorsVega-Guzmán, José Manuel, 1982- (Author) / Sulov, Sergei K (Thesis advisor) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Chowell-Puente, Gerardo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Vector Fitting (VF) is a recent macromodeling method that has been popularized by its use in many commercial software for extracting equivalent circuit's of simulated networks. Specifically for material measurement applications, VF is shown to estimate either the permittivity or permeability of a multi-Debye material accurately, even when measured in

Vector Fitting (VF) is a recent macromodeling method that has been popularized by its use in many commercial software for extracting equivalent circuit's of simulated networks. Specifically for material measurement applications, VF is shown to estimate either the permittivity or permeability of a multi-Debye material accurately, even when measured in the presence of noise and interferences caused by test setup imperfections. A brief history and survey of methods utilizing VF for material measurement will be introduced in this work. It is shown how VF is useful for macromodeling dielectric materials after being measured with standard transmission line and free-space methods. The sources of error in both an admittance tunnel test device and stripline resonant cavity test device are identified and VF is employed for correcting these errors. Full-wave simulations are performed to model the test setup imperfections and the sources of interference they cause are further verified in actual hardware measurements. An accurate macromodel is attained as long as the signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) in the measurement is sufficiently high such that the Debye relaxations are observable in the data. Finally, VF is applied for macromodeling the time history of the total fields scattering from a perfectly conducting wedge. This effort is an initial test to see if a time domain theory of diffraction exists, and if the diffraction coefficients may be exactly modeled with VF. This section concludes how VF is not only useful for applications in material measurement, but for the solution of modeling fields and interactions in general.
ContributorsRichards, Evan (Author) / Diaz, Rodolfo E (Thesis advisor) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Extraordinary medical advances have led to significant reductions in the burden of infectious diseases in humans. However, infectious diseases still account for more than 13 million annual deaths. This large burden is partly due to some pathogens having found suitable conditions to emerge and spread in denser and more connected

Extraordinary medical advances have led to significant reductions in the burden of infectious diseases in humans. However, infectious diseases still account for more than 13 million annual deaths. This large burden is partly due to some pathogens having found suitable conditions to emerge and spread in denser and more connected host populations, and others having evolved to escape the pressures imposed by the rampant use of antimicrobials. It is then critical to improve our understanding of how diseases spread in these modern landscapes, characterized by new host population structures and socio-economic environments, as well as containment measures such as the deployment of drugs. Thus, the motivation of this dissertation is two-fold. First, we study, using both data-driven and modeling approaches, the the spread of infectious diseases in urban areas. As a case study, we use confirmed-cases data on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the United States to assess the conduciveness of population size of urban areas and their socio-economic characteristics as predictors of STD incidence. We find that the scaling of STD incidence in cities is superlinear, and that the percent of African-Americans residing in cities largely determines these statistical patterns. Since disparities in access to health care are often exacerbated in urban areas, within this project we also develop two modeling frameworks to study the effect of health care disparities on epidemic outcomes. Discrepant results between the two approaches indicate that knowledge of the shape of the recovery period distribution, not just its mean and variance, is key for assessing the epidemiological impact of inequalities. The second project proposes to study, from a modeling perspective, the spread of drug resistance in human populations featuring vital dynamics, stochasticity and contact structure. We derive effective treatment regimes that minimize both the overall disease burden and the spread of resistance. Additionally, targeted treatment in structured host populations may lead to higher levels of drug resistance, and if drug-resistant strains are compensated, they can spread widely even when the wild-type strain is below its epidemic threshold.
ContributorsPatterson-Lomba, Oscar (Author) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Towers, Sherry (Thesis advisor) / Chowell-Puente, Gerardo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Urban scaling analysis has introduced a new scientific paradigm to the study of cities. With it, the notions of size, heterogeneity and structure have taken a leading role. These notions are assumed to be behind the causes for why cities differ from one another, sometimes wildly. However, the mechanisms by

Urban scaling analysis has introduced a new scientific paradigm to the study of cities. With it, the notions of size, heterogeneity and structure have taken a leading role. These notions are assumed to be behind the causes for why cities differ from one another, sometimes wildly. However, the mechanisms by which size, heterogeneity and structure shape the general statistical patterns that describe urban economic output are still unclear. Given the rapid rate of urbanization around the globe, we need precise and formal mathematical understandings of these matters. In this context, I perform in this dissertation probabilistic, distributional and computational explorations of (i) how the broadness, or narrowness, of the distribution of individual productivities within cities determines what and how we measure urban systemic output, (ii) how urban scaling may be expressed as a statistical statement when urban metrics display strong stochasticity, (iii) how the processes of aggregation constrain the variability of total urban output, and (iv) how the structure of urban skills diversification within cities induces a multiplicative process in the production of urban output.
ContributorsGómez-Liévano, Andrés (Author) / Lobo, Jose (Thesis advisor) / Muneepeerakul, Rachata (Thesis advisor) / Bettencourt, Luis M. A. (Committee member) / Chowell-Puente, Gerardo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
This thesis describes an approach to system identification based on compressive sensing and demonstrates its efficacy on a challenging classical benchmark single-input, multiple output (SIMO) mechanical system consisting of an inverted pendulum on a cart. Due to its inherent non-linearity and unstable behavior, very few techniques currently exist that are

This thesis describes an approach to system identification based on compressive sensing and demonstrates its efficacy on a challenging classical benchmark single-input, multiple output (SIMO) mechanical system consisting of an inverted pendulum on a cart. Due to its inherent non-linearity and unstable behavior, very few techniques currently exist that are capable of identifying this system. The challenge in identification also lies in the coupled behavior of the system and in the difficulty of obtaining the full-range dynamics. The differential equations describing the system dynamics are determined from measurements of the system's input-output behavior. These equations are assumed to consist of the superposition, with unknown weights, of a small number of terms drawn from a large library of nonlinear terms. Under this assumption, compressed sensing allows the constituent library elements and their corresponding weights to be identified by decomposing a time-series signal of the system's outputs into a sparse superposition of corresponding time-series signals produced by the library components. The most popular techniques for non-linear system identification entail the use of ANN's (Artificial Neural Networks), which require a large number of measurements of the input and output data at high sampling frequencies. The method developed in this project requires very few samples and the accuracy of reconstruction is extremely high. Furthermore, this method yields the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) of the system explicitly. This is in contrast to some ANN approaches that produce only a trained network which might lose fidelity with change of initial conditions or if facing an input that wasn't used during its training. This technique is expected to be of value in system identification of complex dynamic systems encountered in diverse fields such as Biology, Computation, Statistics, Mechanics and Electrical Engineering.
ContributorsNaik, Manjish Arvind (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis advisor) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Kawski, Matthias (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
This thesis considers the application of basis pursuit to several problems in system identification. After reviewing some key results in the theory of basis pursuit and compressed sensing, numerical experiments are presented that explore the application of basis pursuit to the black-box identification of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with both

This thesis considers the application of basis pursuit to several problems in system identification. After reviewing some key results in the theory of basis pursuit and compressed sensing, numerical experiments are presented that explore the application of basis pursuit to the black-box identification of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with both finite (FIR) and infinite (IIR) impulse responses, temporal systems modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODE), and spatio-temporal systems modeled by partial differential equations (PDE). For LTI systems, the experimental results illustrate existing theory for identification of LTI FIR systems. It is seen that basis pursuit does not identify sparse LTI IIR systems, but it does identify alternate systems with nearly identical magnitude response characteristics when there are small numbers of non-zero coefficients. For ODE systems, the experimental results are consistent with earlier research for differential equations that are polynomials in the system variables, illustrating feasibility of the approach for small numbers of non-zero terms. For PDE systems, it is demonstrated that basis pursuit can be applied to system identification, along with a comparison in performance with another existing method. In all cases the impact of measurement noise on identification performance is considered, and it is empirically observed that high signal-to-noise ratio is required for successful application of basis pursuit to system identification problems.
ContributorsThompson, Robert C. (Author) / Platte, Rodrigo (Thesis advisor) / Gelb, Anne (Committee member) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Diseases have been part of human life for generations and evolve within the population, sometimes dying out while other times becoming endemic or the cause of recurrent outbreaks. The long term influence of a disease stems from different dynamics within or between pathogen-host, that have been analyzed and studied by

Diseases have been part of human life for generations and evolve within the population, sometimes dying out while other times becoming endemic or the cause of recurrent outbreaks. The long term influence of a disease stems from different dynamics within or between pathogen-host, that have been analyzed and studied by many researchers using mathematical models. Co-infection with different pathogens is common, yet little is known about how infection with one pathogen affects the host's immunological response to another. Moreover, no work has been found in the literature that considers the variability of the host immune health or that examines a disease at the population level and its corresponding interconnectedness with the host immune system. Knowing that the spread of the disease in the population starts at the individual level, this thesis explores how variability in immune system response within an endemic environment affects an individual's vulnerability, and how prone it is to co-infections. Immunology-based models of Malaria and Tuberculosis (TB) are constructed by extending and modifying existing mathematical models in the literature. The two are then combined to give a single nine-variable model of co-infection with Malaria and TB. Because these models are difficult to gain any insight analytically due to the large number of parameters, a phenomenological model of co-infection is proposed with subsystems corresponding to the individual immunology-based model of a single infection. Within this phenomenological model, the variability of the host immune health is also incorporated through three different pathogen response curves using nonlinear bounded Michaelis-Menten functions that describe the level or state of immune system (healthy, moderate and severely compromised). The immunology-based models of Malaria and TB give numerical results that agree with the biological observations. The Malaria--TB co-infection model gives reasonable results and these suggest that the order in which the two diseases are introduced have an impact on the behavior of both. The subsystems of the phenomenological models that correspond to a single infection (either of Malaria or TB) mimic much of the observed behavior of the immunology-based counterpart and can demonstrate different behavior depending on the chosen pathogen response curve. In addition, varying some of the parameters and initial conditions in the phenomenological model yields a range of topologically different mathematical behaviors, which suggests that this behavior may be able to be observed in the immunology-based models as well. The phenomenological models clearly replicate the qualitative behavior of primary and secondary infection as well as co-infection. The mathematical solutions of the models correspond to the fundamental states described by immunologists: virgin state, immune state and tolerance state. The phenomenological model of co-infection also demonstrates a range of parameter values and initial conditions in which the introduction of a second disease causes both diseases to grow without bound even though those same parameters and initial conditions did not yield unbounded growth in the corresponding subsystems. This results applies to all three states of the host immune system. In terms of the immunology-based system, this would suggest the following: there may be parameter values and initial conditions in which a person can clear Malaria or TB (separately) from their system but in which the presence of both can result in the person dying of one of the diseases. Finally, this thesis studies links between epidemiology (population level) and immunology in an effort to assess the impact of pathogen's spread within the population on the immune response of individuals. Models of Malaria and TB are proposed that incorporate the immune system of the host into a mathematical model of an epidemic at the population level.
ContributorsSoho, Edmé L (Author) / Wirkus, Stephen (Thesis advisor) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Chowell-Puente, Gerardo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
The Quantum Harmonic Oscillator is one of the most important models in Quantum Mechanics. Analogous to the classical mass vibrating back and forth on a spring, the quantum oscillator system has attracted substantial attention over the years because of its importance in many advanced and difficult quantum problems. This dissertation

The Quantum Harmonic Oscillator is one of the most important models in Quantum Mechanics. Analogous to the classical mass vibrating back and forth on a spring, the quantum oscillator system has attracted substantial attention over the years because of its importance in many advanced and difficult quantum problems. This dissertation deals with solving generalized models of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation which are called generalized quantum harmonic oscillators, and these are characterized by an arbitrary quadratic Hamiltonian of linear momentum and position operators. The primary challenge in this work is that most quantum models with timedependence are not solvable explicitly, yet this challenge became the driving motivation for this work. In this dissertation, the methods used to solve the time-dependent Schrodinger equation are the fundamental singularity (or Green's function) and the Fourier (eigenfunction expansion) methods. Certain Riccati- and Ermakov-type systems arise, and these systems are highlighted and investigated. The overall aims of this dissertation are to show that quadratic Hamiltonian systems are completely integrable systems, and to provide explicit approaches to solving the time-dependent Schr¨odinger equation governed by an arbitrary quadratic Hamiltonian operator. The methods and results established in the dissertation are not yet well recognized in the literature, yet hold for high promise for further future research. Finally, the most recent results in the dissertation correspond to the harmonic oscillator group and its symmetries. A simple derivation of the maximum kinematical invariance groups of the free particle and quantum harmonic oscillator is constructed from the view point of the Riccati- and Ermakov-type systems, which shows an alternative to the traditional Lie Algebra approach. To conclude, a missing class of solutions of the time-dependent Schr¨odinger equation for the simple harmonic oscillator in one dimension is constructed. Probability distributions of the particle linear position and momentum, are emphasized with Mathematica animations. The eigenfunctions qualitatively differ from the traditional standing waves of the one-dimensional Schrodinger equation. The physical relevance of these dynamic states is still questionable, and in order to investigate their physical meaning, animations could also be created for the squeezed coherent states. This will be addressed in future work.
ContributorsLopez, Raquel (Author) / Suslov, Sergei K (Thesis advisor) / Radunskaya, Ami (Committee member) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Modern measurement schemes for linear dynamical systems are typically designed so that different sensors can be scheduled to be used at each time step. To determine which sensors to use, various metrics have been suggested. One possible such metric is the observability of the system. Observability is a binary condition

Modern measurement schemes for linear dynamical systems are typically designed so that different sensors can be scheduled to be used at each time step. To determine which sensors to use, various metrics have been suggested. One possible such metric is the observability of the system. Observability is a binary condition determining whether a finite number of measurements suffice to recover the initial state. However to employ observability for sensor scheduling, the binary definition needs to be expanded so that one can measure how observable a system is with a particular measurement scheme, i.e. one needs a metric of observability. Most methods utilizing an observability metric are about sensor selection and not for sensor scheduling. In this dissertation we present a new approach to utilize the observability for sensor scheduling by employing the condition number of the observability matrix as the metric and using column subset selection to create an algorithm to choose which sensors to use at each time step. To this end we use a rank revealing QR factorization algorithm to select sensors. Several numerical experiments are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.
ContributorsIlkturk, Utku (Author) / Gelb, Anne (Thesis advisor) / Platte, Rodrigo (Thesis advisor) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Renaut, Rosemary (Committee member) / Armbruster, Dieter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Factory production is stochastic in nature with time varying input and output processes that are non-stationary stochastic processes. Hence, the principle quantities of interest are random variables. Typical modeling of such behavior involves numerical simulation and statistical analysis. A deterministic closure model leading to a second

Factory production is stochastic in nature with time varying input and output processes that are non-stationary stochastic processes. Hence, the principle quantities of interest are random variables. Typical modeling of such behavior involves numerical simulation and statistical analysis. A deterministic closure model leading to a second order model for the product density and product speed has previously been proposed. The resulting partial differential equations (PDE) are compared to discrete event simulations (DES) that simulate factory production as a time dependent M/M/1 queuing system. Three fundamental scenarios for the time dependent influx are studied: An instant step up/down of the mean arrival rate; an exponential step up/down of the mean arrival rate; and periodic variation of the mean arrival rate. It is shown that the second order model, in general, yields significant improvement over current first order models. Specifically, the agreement between the DES and the PDE for the step up and for periodic forcing that is not too rapid is very good. Adding diffusion to the PDE further improves the agreement. The analysis also points to fundamental open issues regarding the deterministic modeling of low signal-to-noise ratio for some stochastic processes and the possibility of resonance in deterministic models that is not present in the original stochastic process.
ContributorsWienke, Matthew (Author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis advisor) / Jones, Donald (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Gardner, Carl (Committee member) / Ringhofer, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015