Related papers: Robust estimation of microbial diversity in theory…
Monitoring the distribution of microfossils in stratigraphic successions is an essential tool for biostratigraphic, evolutionary and paleoecologic/paleoceanographic studies. To estimate the relative abundance (%) of a given species, it is…
Soil microbial communities are known to be robust against perturbations such as nutrition inputs, which appears as an obstacle for the soil improvement. On the other hand, its adaptable aspect has been also reported. Here we propose simple…
In this paper entropy based methods are compared and used to measure structural diversity of an ensemble of 21 classifiers. This measure is mostly applied in ecology, whereby species counts are used as a measure of diversity. The measures…
Moran or Wright-Fisher processes are probably the most well known model to study the evolution of a population under various effects. Our object of study will be the Simpson index which measures the level of diversity of the population, one…
The diversity of a community that cannot be fully counted must be inferred. The two preeminent inference methods are the MaxEnt method, which uses information in the form of constraints and Bayes' rule which uses information in the form of…
Understanding the complex interactions within the microbiome is crucial for developing effective diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Traditional machine learning models often lack interpretability, which is essential for clinical and…
Our view of the microbial world and its impact on human health is changing radically with the ability to sequence uncultured or unculturable microbes sampled directly from their habitats, ability made possible by fast and cheap next…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical…
Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of…
Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…
By creating networks of biochemical pathways, communities of micro-organisms are able to modulate the properties of their environment and even the metabolic processes within their hosts. Next-generation high-throughput sequencing has led to…
Metagenomics sequencing is routinely applied to quantify bacterial abundances in microbiome studies, where the bacterial composition is estimated based on the sequencing read counts. Due to limited sequencing depth and DNA dropouts, many…
We used a metacommunity of 49 discrete communities of aquatic invertebrates to analyze the dynamical relationship between community and metacommunity species distributions as a test of the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. At…
Entropy, under a variety of names, has long been used as a measure of diversity in ecology, as well as in genetics, economics and other fields. There is a spectrum of viewpoints on diversity, indexed by a real parameter q giving greater or…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
A measure called Physical Complexity is established and calculated for a population of sequences, based on statistical physics, automata theory, and information theory. It is a measure of the quantity of information in an organism's genome.…
The presence of uncommon taxa in high-throughput sequenced ecological samples pose challenges to the microbial ecologist, bioinformatician and statistician. It is rarely certain whether these taxa are truly present in the sample or the…
Background: In the metagenome assembly of a microbiome community, we may think abundant species would be easier to assemble due to their deeper coverage. However, this conjucture is rarely tested. We often do not know how many abundant…
The microbiome constitutes a complex microbial ecology of interacting components that regulates important pathways in the host. Measurements of microbial abundances are key to learning the intricate network of interactions amongst microbes.…
Global species richness is a key biodiversity metric. Despite recent efforts to estimate global species richness, the resulting estimates have been highly uncertain and often logically inconsistent. Estimates lower down either the taxonomic…