Big news about MAXENT

Ian Renner and I just published a paper in Biometrics show in the MAXENT is mathematically equivalent to a GLM (and hence related to poisson point process models).  See the Methods Blog for a more detailed post on this result and its implications.

Welcome Sara Taskinen

Welcome to Sara Taskinen of the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland (pictured below - she's the one in the middle!).  Sara will be visiting us here at UNSW for all of 2013.  She is an expert in robust statistics especially with multivariate applications, so we've been doing some work robustifying methods of estimation and inference about allometric lines, i.e. modifying how MA and SMA lines are estimated so that they are less sensitive to outliers.  Some of our earlier work has already been incorporated into the SMATR package, and a paper on some of our earlier ideas on how to construct robust confidence intervals for slope was recently published in the Biometrical Journal.  We've since been robustifying methods of hypothesis testing about one or several allometric lines - paper and code coming soon!

Eco-Stats symposium in Sydney Australia, July 11-12 2013