Bayesian Hierarchical Modelling for Tailoring Metric Thresholds

Software is highly contextual. While there are cross-cutting `global' lessons, individual software projects exhibit many `local' properties. This data heterogeneity makes drawing local conclusions from global data dangerous. A key research challenge is to construct locally accurate prediction models that are informed by global characteristics and data volumes. Previous work has tackled this problem using clustering and transfer learning approaches, which identify locally similar characteristics. This paper applies a simpler approach known as Bayesian hierarchical modeling. We show that hierarchical modeling supports cross-project comparisons, while preserving local context. To demonstrate the approach, we conduct a conceptual replication of an existing study on setting software metrics thresholds. Our emerging results show our hierarchical model reduces model prediction error compared to a global approach by up to 50%.Comment: Short paper, published at MSR '18: 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories May 28--29, 2018, Gothenburg, Swede

Investment in Infectious Disease Control Capacity: The Case of a Potential Foot-and-Mouth Disease Outbreak in California

Health Economics and Policy,

The contemporary literary short story

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1939. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

New York\u27s Expanding Empire in Tort Jurisdiction: Quo Vadis

In Miller v. Miller the New York Court of Appeals held that New York law applied in a case which had minimum contacts with the Empire State. In criticizing the decision, the author questions its constitutionality and suggests New York has gone too far in its total repudiation of the lex loci delicti rule

Three Scottish critics, an essay in the history of ideas.

Thesis (Ph.D.)—Boston UniversityThe latter part of the eighteenth century is fertile ground for the study of the history of ideas, for it presents the student with the problems of an age of transition which is not so complicated by political, economic, or religious factors as to make general analyses virtually impossible. Scotland affords a particularly good area for this study of the transition from the characteristic thinking of the neo-classical age to that of the romantic, for there we can find a large body of systematic thought produced by a homogeneous society. The members of this society who worked primarily in philosophy, economics, or history are well known, but there were also many men of lesser note but still of considerable ability, whose ideas can tell us much about the kind of thinking that went on at that time. This dissertation investigates and analyzes the thought of three of these representative men: Hugh Blair (1718-1801), Henry Home Lord Kames (1696-1782), and George Campbell (1719-1796). The specific focus is on literary criticism, for which these men are principally noted, and the analyses are concerned primarily with the one major work each man wrote in this field: Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Kames' Elements of Criticism, and Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric. [TRUNCATED