Related papers: Diversity in Biology: definitions, quantification,…
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…
In ecology, the description of species composition and biodiversity calls for statistical methods that involve estimating features of interest in unobserved samples based on an observed one. In the last decade, the Bayesian nonparametrics…
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
Population stratification is a problem encountered in several areas of biology and public health. We tackle this problem by mapping a population and its elements attributes into a hypergraph, a natural extension of the concept of graph or…
Algorithmic modeling relies on limited information in data to extrapolate outcomes for unseen scenarios, often embedding an element of arbitrariness in its decisions. A perspective on this arbitrariness that has recently gained interest is…
The abrupt outbreak and transmission of biological diseases has always been a long-time concern of humankind. For long, mathematical modeling has served as a simple and yet efficient tool to investigate, predict, and control spread of…
Due to the complexity of the human body, most diseases present a high inter-personal variability in the way they manifest, i.e. in their phenotype, which has important clinical repercussions - as for instance the difficulty in defining…
Motivation: Bioinformatics is faced with a variety of problems that require human involvement. Tasks like genome annotation, image analysis, knowledge-base construction and protein structure determination all benefit from human input. In…
With the rapid development of recommender systems, accuracy is no longer the only golden criterion for evaluating whether the recommendation results are satisfying or not. In recent years, diversity has gained tremendous attention in…
A taxonomy is a standardized framework to classify and organize items into categories. Hierarchical taxonomies are ubiquitous, ranging from the classification of organisms to the file system on a computer. Characterizing the typical…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
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…
Diversity can be broadly defined as the presence of meaningful variation across elements, which can be viewed from multiple perspectives, including statistical variation and geometric structural richness in the dataset. Existing diversity…
Technological innovations have revolutionized the process of scientific research and knowledge discovery. The availability of massive data and challenges from frontiers of research and development have reshaped statistical thinking, data…
Diversity is a commonly known principle in the design of recommender systems, but also ambiguous in its conceptualization. Through semi-structured interviews we explore how practitioners at three different public service media organizations…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
We introduce a new dominance concept consisting of three new dominance metrics based on Lloyd's (1967) mean crowding index. The new metrics link communities and species, whereas existing ones are applicable only to communities. Our…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
Popular measures of meta-analysis heterogeneity, such as $I^2$, cannot be considered measures of population heterogeneity since they are dependant on samples sizes within studies. The coefficient of variation (CV) recently introduced and…
Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Inhomogeneous models of populations and communities allow for birth and death rates to vary among…