Related papers: Inference for changes in biodiversity
Researchers and managers model ecological communities to infer the biotic and abiotic variables that shape species' ranges, habitat use, and co-occurrence which, in turn, are used to support management decisions and test ecological…
A novel approach to improve prediction and inference in M-estimation by integrating external information from heterogeneous populations is proposed. Our method leverages joint asymptotics to combine estimates from external and internal…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
We propose a doubly robust approach to characterizing treatment effect heterogeneity in observational studies. We develop a frequentist inferential procedure that utilizes posterior distributions for both the propensity score and outcome…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…
The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies has made data from DNA material readily available, leading to a surge of microbiome-related research establishing links between markers of microbiome health and specific outcomes.…
Estimating the sharing of genetic effects across different conditions is important to many statistical analyses of genomic data. The patterns of sharing arising from these data are often highly heterogeneous. To flexibly model these…
Interest in the study of in-host microbial communities has increased in recent years due to our improved understanding of the communities' significant role in host health. As a result, the ability to model these communities using…
One important problem in microbiome analysis is to identify the bacterial taxa that are associated with a response, where the microbiome data are summarized as the composition of the bacterial taxa at different taxonomic levels. This paper…
With the development of next generation sequencing technology, researchers have now been able to study the microbiome composition using direct sequencing, whose output are bacterial taxa counts for each microbiome sample. One goal of…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
This paper investigates the robustness of futility analyses in clinical trials when interim analysis population deviates from the target population. We demonstrate how population shifts can distort early stopping decisions and propose…
In microbiome studies, it is of interest to use a sample from a population of microbes, such as the gut microbiota community, to estimate the population proportion of these taxa. However, due to biases introduced in sampling and…
Meta-analytic methods may be used to combine evidence from different sources of information. Quite commonly, the normal-normal hierarchical model (NNHM) including a random-effect to account for between-study heterogeneity is utilized for…
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…
Complementarity among species with different traits is one of the basic processes affecting biodiversity, defined as the number of species in the ecosystem. We present here a soluble model ecosystem in which the species are characterized by…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
The participants in randomized trials and other studies used for causal inference are often not representative of the populations seen by clinical decision-makers. To account for differences between populations, researchers may consider…
Suppose that we are interested in the comparison of two independent categorical variables. Suppose also that the population is divided into subpopulations or groups. Notice that the distribution of the target variable may vary across…
This is a preliminary article stating and proving a new maximum entropy theorem. The entropies that we consider can be used as measures of biodiversity. In that context, the question is: for a given collection of species, which frequency…