Date of Award
1-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Mathematics & Statistics
Program/Concentration
Computational and Applied Mathematics
Committee Director
Sinjini Sikdar
Committee Member
Sandipan Dutta
Committee Member
Yet Nguyen
Committee Member
Hadiza Galadima
Abstract
With advancements in statistical modeling and the growing availability of high-dimensional genomics data, researchers have developed numerous methods to address the challenges and opportunities presented in such data. While many classification or regression techniques exist, their performance often depends heavily on the evaluation criteria used, and it is rarely clear a priori which technique will perform best for a given application. To address this uncertainty, we consider ensemble approaches that leverage bagging and rank aggregation techniques, applied separately to classification and regression problems. In the first part of this work, we introduce an ensemble classifier designed to optimize classification of ordinal outcomes in high-dimensional data. This classifier integrates several existing ordinal classification algorithms, improving predictive performance across multiple evaluation metrics. The second part focuses on ensemble prediction for count outcomes in high-dimensional settings. Similar to the classification framework, this regression ensemble combines multiple existing algorithms to optimize predictive performance across various evaluation criteria. Through extensive simulation studies and real-world genomic applications, we demonstrate that our ensemble methods consistently outperform or closely match the best-performing individual algorithms in both classification and regression contexts. These findings highlight that, when addressing the complexities of high-dimensional data, adopting an ensemble approach that integrates multiple models may provide superior and more reliable performance than relying on a single algorithm.
Rights
In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
DOI
10.25777/ccdw-zw44
ISBN
9798276041919
Recommended Citation
Rathnasekara, Heranga K..
"Statistical Learning Methods for Predicting Ordinal and Count Outcomes in Genomics Data"
(2026). Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Dissertation, Mathematics & Statistics, Old Dominion University, DOI: 10.25777/ccdw-zw44
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/mathstat_etds/138
ORCID
0009-0003-2182-3532
Included in
Applied Mathematics Commons, Applied Statistics Commons, Bioinformatics Commons, Biostatistics Commons, Statistical Methodology Commons