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Dr. Yew-Meng Koh

Hope College

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A Little About Me

In high school, I was introduced to Statistics and I was attracted to it from the start. At that time, I was intrigued by how math (particularly Calculus) was used in Statistics (which was the focus in Malaysia). This led me to pursue Statistics in grad school. It was surprising to me that the deeper I got into Statistics, even with all the complicated mathematical details, the overall big picture of what Statistics was about became clearer and clearer. It was a case of ‘seeing the forest in spite of having to stare at each and every leaf.’ I have an undergraduate degree in Math from the University of Malaya in Malaysia. I also have an MS in Statistics from the University of Malaya. I have an MS and PhD in Statistics from Iowa State University. Before I came to the US, I taught at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia Campus. Most recently, I was a Teaching Assistant at Iowa State University. Now, I am a professor of Statistics at Hope College.

Analysing the Numbers
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Courses I Teach

MATH 210: Introductory Statistics
MATH 311: Statistical Methods
MATH 312: Applied Statistical Models
MATH 361/363: Introduction to Probability and Probability for Actuaries
MATH 362: Mathematical Statistics

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My Research

Using Statistics Outside of the Classroom

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Predicting Disease Outcome

To conduct research on Dengue Fever we used time series models, which model the dependence structure between weekly incidence counts. Time series models do not assume each case is independent of all the others. Some time series models allow for the inclusion of other explanatory variables, and we found that using auxiliary information from them helps in prediction accuracy of dengue fever incidence.

Gun Violence

This research is ongoing and multi-faceted. Last summer, my students and I worked on grouping or clustering the shooting incidents so that we could see patterns and trends emerge more clearly between incidents. We used different methods to achieve this clustering. I am now working on predicting the inter-incident time as well as modelling the intensity of incidents using a Poisson process.

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Would you like to learn more about my research projects?

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Contact Me

Vanderwerf 210
Holland, MI 49423, USA

616.395.7759

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