Student Seminar Series - April 27, 2005
University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Improving the Chemical Mass Balance Model


Chao-Yin Chen


Wednesday, April 27, 2005
2:00 PM, 240 Amundson Hall
Minneapolis, East Bank Campus

Refreshments at 1:30 PM
300 Ford Hall


Abstract

 Particulate matter (PM) suspended in the air is a major public health concern. Because of the importance of PM to human health, PM is routinely monitored by environmental and health agencies of the government. The most commonly used model for estimating source contributions in PM is the effective variance (EV) chemical mass balance (CMB) model. The current EV CMB model has drawbacks, including negative estimated source contributions, problems with multi-collinearity of source profiles and biased estimates due to measurement errors. This dissertation introduces the air quality model and proposes two parallel modifications to improve EV CMB: a constrained CMB model and a Bayesian CMB model. In this talk we will compare the proposed methods with the existing CMB models.