I’m sure by now you’ve heard of MAXENT. Have you got the impression that it’s some revolutionary new method that sits apart from classical methods like GLM? If so I have some big news for you. First a little background – maximum entropy modelling (MAXENT) had its origins in the 1950’s, and went quiet for some time before a resurgence in the machine learning literature … Continue reading Some big news about MAXENT
Issue 4.1 is now available online. This month Methods covers modelling interactions, statistics, population dynamics, surveys and distribution models. All content in this issue is freely available – enjoy! About the cover: There is a growing number of high-quality food-web datasets that are augmented with estimates of body mass and/or numerical abundance. In “Cheddar – analysis and visualisation of ecological communities in R” the authors … Continue reading Issue 4.1
(this is the first in a possibly irregular series of posts about papers that catch my eye. I don’t intend to only cover MEE papers, but I had to start somewhere)
A perennial worry for anyone building models for the real world is whether they actually represent the real world. If the whole process of finding and fitting a model has been done well, the model will represent the data. But the data is only part of the real world. How can we be sure our model will extrapolated beyond the data?
Continue reading “Why Simpler Models are Better”
Our latest video is a must-see for all researchers interested in aging: Fernando Colchero, Owen Jones and Maren Rebke, Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research, present BaSTA – Bayesian Survival Trajectory Analysis. The authors have put together this beautiful video exploring research on ageing and and how to deal with incomplete data. Starring Tim Coulson, Imperial College, Fernando Colchero, Owen Jones, Maren Rebke and James Vaupel, … Continue reading BaSTA
In case you haven’t seen them, this month we have published a new podcast and video so far. In our latest video, David Warton, The University of New South Wales, Australia, presents his ‘mvabund’ package on multivariate analysis. What makes this software different from other ones on multivariate analysis, is that it’s all about models that you can fit to your data. David explains how … Continue reading New podcast and video
It seems that from the number of submissions we receive at the journal, Methods in Ecology and Evolution has filled an important niche. As our editor-in-chief, Rob Freckleton, wrote to introduce our second volume: “those doing science need to be kept up to date on new approaches, and those developing new methods need a place to publish, as well as be supported in getting their … Continue reading Volume 3 Issue 1: Now online
Here is a round-up of interesting methods and methods-related papers published in the past few weeks. Please do pass on any interesting-looking papers / links and I will include them. In Heredity Blanya et al. review the use of Drosophila subobscura as a tool in research on the microevolutionary consequences of climate change. There are several methods-relevant papers in the latest issue of Evolution: Céline … Continue reading Methods Digest – November 2009
Here is a round-up of some interesting methods papers published in the past few weeks. If you see any more papers that you would like to see flagged up, leave a comment below or email me. In PLoS Biology Wayne Getz presents a thoughtful review of the models and modelling approaches that might be useful in predicting the consequences of multiple threats to ecosystems from … Continue reading Methods Digest, October 2009
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