Monday 24 February 2014

Eco-Stats Lab, Feb 2014 - SMATR

The SMATR package (Standardised Major Axis estimation and Testing Routines) is designed for when you are fitting lines and:
- you are primarily interested in the slope (rather than significance or strength of association)
- the problem is symmetric, i.e. you could happily swap which variable is on which axis without changing the meaning of what you are doing.  Or put another way, rather than predicting Y from X (regression), you have a pair of Y variables (Y1 and Y2) and you want to see how they are related to each other.

This situation commonly arises in allometry (the study of how one size variable scales against another), this is the main place these methods are useful in ecology.

MAXENT equivalence paper rated "Exceptional" on Faculty of 1000

The first paper from Ian Renner's PhD thesis, "Equivalence of MAXENT and Poisson point process models for species distribution modeling in ecology", has been rated by the Faculty of 1000.  F1000 is a post-publication peer review website that highlights noteworthy articles from the scientific literature, especially biology and medicine articles.  Renner & Warton (2013) received the top rating (three stars, "Exceptional"), which we are pretty chuffed about.  For details, see the review at http://f1000.com/prime/718270492

Sunday 2 February 2014

Eco-Stats Paper of the Year, 2013

We just had our second annual paper of the year competition, highlighting papers that made an impression to UNSW Eco-Stats researchers over the previous year.  Papers were supposed to be in print in 2013, but this was interpreted generously. And the nominees are...