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We wish to formally test for changes in the taxonomic diversity of a community, especially in the presence of high latent diversity. Drawing on the meta-analysis literature, we construct a model for diversity that accounts for covariate…
The growth rate of large-scale structure provides a powerful consistency test of the standard cosmological model and a probe of possible deviations from general relativity. We use a Fisher analysis to forecast constraints on the growth rate…
Discrete data such as counts of microbiome taxa resulting from next-generation sequencing are routinely encountered in bioinformatics. Taxa count data in microbiome studies are typically high-dimensional, over-dispersed, and can only reveal…
Network datasets appear across a wide range of scientific fields, including biology, physics, and the social sciences. To enable data-driven discoveries from these networks, statistical inference techniques like estimation and hypothesis…
We describe a new and computationally efficient Bayesian methodology for inferring species trees and demographics from unlinked binary markers. Likelihood calculations are carried out using diffusion models of allele frequency dynamics…
Bi-clustering is a useful approach in analyzing biological data when observations come from heterogeneous groups and have a large number of features. We outline a general Bayesian approach in tackling bi-clustering problems in moderate to…
In a multicellular organism different cell types express a gene in different amounts. Samples from which gene expression levels can be measured typically contain a mixture of different cell types, the resulting measurements thus give only…
Studies of the distribution and evolution of galaxies are of fundamental importance to modern cosmology; these studies, however, are hampered by the complexity of the competing effects of spectral and density evolution. Constructing a…
A theory of relative species abundance on sparsely-connected networks is presented by investigating the replicator dynamics with symmetric interactions. Sparseness of a network involves difficulty in analyzing the fixed points of the…
The uniform distribution on matrices with specified row and column sums is often a natural choice of null model when testing for structure in two-way tables (binary or nonnegative integer). Due to the difficulty of sampling from this…
We wish to estimate the total number of classes in a population based on sample counts, especially in the presence of high latent diversity. Drawing on probability theory that characterizes distributions on the integers by ratios of…
Randomized algorithms depend on accurate sampling from probability distributions, as their correctness and performance hinge on the quality of the generated samples. However, even for common distributions like Binomial, exact sampling is…
Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation…
Over the last few decades, prediction models have become a fundamental tool in statistics, chemometrics, and related fields. However, to ensure that such models have high value, the inferences that they generate must be reliable. In this…
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…
Post-stratification is frequently used to improve the precision of survey estimators when categorical auxiliary information is available from sources outside the survey. In natural resource surveys, such information is often obtained from…
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…
A classical problem in statistics is estimating the expected coverage of a sample, which has had applications in gene expression, microbial ecology, optimization, and even numismatics. Here we consider a related extension of this problem to…
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…
An ongoing "reproducibility crisis" calls into question scientific discoveries across a variety of disciplines ranging from life to social sciences. Replication studies aim to investigate the validity of findings in published research, and…