Related papers: Inference for changes in biodiversity
Consider a problem of predicting a response variable using a set of covariates in a linear regression model. If it is \emph{a priori} known or suspected that a subset of the covariates do not significantly contribute to the overall fit of…
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…
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.…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
We introduce two models of multiwinner elections with approval preferences and labelled candidates that take the committee's diversity into account. One model aims to find a committee with maximal diversity given a scoring function (e.g. of…
Many applications of causal inference require using treatment effects estimated on a study population to make decisions in a separate target population. We consider the challenging setting where there are covariates that are observed in the…
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…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
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…
We study the impact of contagion in a network of firms facing credit risk. We describe an intensity based model where the homogeneity assumption is broken by introducing a random environment that makes it possible to take into account the…
McGill's theory of biodiversity is based upon three axioms: individuals of the same species cluster together, many rare species co-exist with a few common ones and individuals of different species grow independently of each other. Over the…
Inferring concerted changes among biological traits along an evolutionary history remains an important yet challenging problem. Besides adjusting for spurious correlation induced from the shared history, the task also requires sufficient…
Modelling a complex system is almost invariably a challenging task. The incorporation of experimental observations can be used to improve the quality of a model, and thus to obtain better predictions about the behavior of the corresponding…
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…
We consider the problem of estimating fold-changes in the expected value of a multivariate outcome observed with unknown sample-specific and category-specific perturbations. This challenge arises in high-throughput sequencing studies of the…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
Over the past two decades, shrinkage priors have become increasingly popular, and many proposals can be found in the literature. These priors aim to shrink small effects to zero while maintaining true large effects. Horseshoe-type priors…
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…
The rapid advancement of environmental sequencing technologies, such as metagenomics, has significantly enhanced our ability to study microbial communities. The eubiotic composition of these communities is crucial for maintaining ecological…
Heterogeneity is a dominant factor in the behaviour of many biological processes. Despite this, it is common for mathematical and statistical analyses to ignore biological heterogeneity as a source of variability in experimental data.…