Related papers: Robust estimation of microbial diversity in theory…
We introduce a method to identify heritable microbiome communities when the input is a pairwise dissimilarity matrix among all samples. Current methods target each taxon individually and are unable to take advantage of their phylogenetic…
Personalized models of the gut microbiome are valuable for disease prevention and treatment. For this, one requires a mathematical model that predicts microbial community composition and the emergent behavior of microbial communities. We…
Entropy estimation plays a significant role in biology, economics, physics, communication engineering and other disciplines. It is increasingly used in software engineering, e.g. in software confidentiality, software testing, predictive…
In this article we discuss estimation of the common variance of several normal populations with tree order restricted means. We discuss the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator of the variance as the number of…
In microbiome studies, it is often of great interest to identify clusters or partitions of microbiome profiles within a study population and to characterize the distinctive attributes of each resulting microbial community. While raw counts…
Microbes are often discussed in terms of dichotomies such as copiotrophic/oligotrophic and fast/slow-growing microbes, defined using the characterisation of microbial growth in isolated cultures. The dichotomies are usually qualitative…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
Difficulties identifying appropriate biodiversity impact metrics remain a major barrier to inclusion of biodiversity considerations in environmentally responsible investment. We propose and analyse a simple science-based local metric: the…
Ranked set sampling is a sampling design which has a wide range of applications in industrial statistics, and environmental and ecological studies, etc.. It is well known that ranked set samples provide more Fisher information than simple…
The human microbiome is a complex ecological system, and describing its structure and function under different environmental conditions is important from both basic scientific and medical perspectives. Viewed through a biostatistical lens,…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Machine and deep learning have grown in popularity and use in biological research over the last decade but still present challenges in interpretability of the fitted model. The development and use of metrics to determine features driving…
A major challenge in sparsity pattern estimation is that small modes are difficult to detect in the presence of noise. This problem is alleviated if one can observe samples from multiple realizations of the nonzero values for the same…
Estimating the strength of dependency between two variables is fundamental for exploratory analysis and many other applications in data mining. For example: non-linear dependencies between two continuous variables can be explored with the…
Microbiomes are complex systems comprised of many interacting species. Species can survive harsh or changing conditions by rapid adaptation, a process accelerated by the exchange of genetic material between different species through…
Investigation of species abundance has become a vital component of many ecological monitoring studies. The primary objective of these studies is to understand how specific species are distributed across the study domain, as well as…
In this paper, we focus on susceptible-infected-susceptible dynamics on metapopulation networks, where nodes represent subpopulations, and where agents diffuse and interact. Recent studies suggest that heterogeneous network structure…
Estimating the number of communities is one of the fundamental problems in community detection. We re-examine the Bayesian paradigm for stochastic block models and propose a "corrected Bayesian information criterion",to determine the number…
We consider the estimation of densities in multiple subpopulations, where the available sample size in each subpopulation greatly varies. This problem occurs in epidemiology, for example, where different diseases may share similar…
We define a one-parameter family of entropies, each assigning a real number to any probability measure on a compact metric space (or, more generally, a compact Hausdorff space with a notion of similarity between points). These entropies…