English

Stochastic differential equation based on a multimodal potential to model movement data in ecology

Statistics Theory 2017-09-22 v3 Applications Statistics Theory

Abstract

This paper proposes a new model for individuals movement in ecology. The movement process is defined as a solution to a stochastic differential equation whose drift is the gradient of a multimodal potential surface. This offers a new flexible approach among the popular potential based movement models in ecology. To perform parameter inference, the widely used Euler method is compared with two other pseudo-likelihood procedures and with a Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization approach based on exact simulation of diffusions. Performances of all methods are assessed with simulated data and with a data set of fishing vessels trajectories. We show that the usual Euler method performs worse than the other procedures for all sampling schemes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.09103,
  title  = {Stochastic differential equation based on a multimodal potential to model movement data in ecology},
  author = {Pierre Gloaguen and Marie-Pierre Etienne and Sylvain Le Corff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.09103},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:09:01.875Z