Related papers: Linking resource selection and step selection mode…
Habitat selection models are used in ecology to link the distribution of animals to environmental covariates, and identify habitats that are important for conservation. The most widely used models of this type, resource selection functions,…
1. Predicting space use patterns of animals from their interactions with the environment is fundamental for understanding the effect of habitat changes on ecosystem functioning. Recent attempts to address this problem have sought to unify…
Both resources in the natural environment and concepts in a semantic space are distributed "patchily", with large gaps in between the patches. To describe people's internal and external foraging behavior, various random walk models have…
Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…
We show that evolutionary computation can be implemented as standard Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling. With some care, `genetic algorithms' can be constructed that are reversible Markov chains that satisfy detailed balance; it…
A resource selection function is a model of the likelihood that an available spatial unit will be used by an animal, given its resource value. But how do we appropriately define availability? Step-selection analysis deals with this problem…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
Understanding species-habitat associations is fundamental to ecological sciences and for species conservation. Consequently, various statistical approaches have been designed to infer species-habitat associations. Due to their conceptual…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have existed for a long time and the field is well-explored. The purpose of MCMC methods is to approximate a distribution through repeated sampling; most MCMC algorithms exhibit asymptotically optimal…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method often used in Bayesian learning. MCMC methods can be difficult to deploy on parallel and distributed systems due to their inherently sequential nature. We study asynchronous Gibbs…
Animal learning has interested ecologists and psychologists for over a century. Mathematical models that explain how animals store and recall information have gained attention recently. Central to this work is statistical decision theory…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
The study of animal movement is challenging because it is a process modulated by many factors acting at different spatial and temporal scales. Several models have been proposed which differ primarily in the temporal conceptualization,…
MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…
Wild animals are commonly fitted with trackers that record their position through time, and statistical models for tracking data broadly fall into two categories: models focused on small-scale movement decisions, and models for large-scale…
In the three decades since its introduction, resource selection analysis (RSA) has become a widespread method for analyzing spatial patterns of animal relocations obtained from telemetry studies. Recently, mechanistic home range models have…
In large-scale genomic applications vast numbers of molecular features are scanned in order to find a small number of candidates which are linked to a particular disease or phenotype. This is a variable selection problem in the "large p,…
It is common practice in Markov chain Monte Carlo to update the simulation one variable (or sub-block of variables) at a time, rather than conduct a single full-dimensional update. When it is possible to draw from each full-conditional…
Gibbs sampling is a widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for numerically approximating integrals of interest in Bayesian statistics and other mathematical sciences. Many implementations of MCMC methods do not extend easily to…