Inferring Ecological Networks From Species Abundance Data

نویسنده

  • Frank Dondelinger
چکیده

Network reconstruction methods are commonly used in molecular biology to construct regulatory networks from information about the expression values of genes in a cell. In ecology, we are presented with a similar problem when trying to reconstruct species interaction networks based on species abundance data. The aim of this project was to see if the methods that proved successful in molecular biology could be applied to this new problem. The methods that I applied and compared were Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), Sparse Bayesian Regression (SBR), Graphical Gaussian Models (GGMs) and Bayesian Networks (BNs). To evaluate the performance of these methods, I used data derived from a realistic population simulation model, based on a niche model of species interactions. The experiments showed that these methods were successful at reconstructing the species interaction networks, and that the comparatively simple LASSO, SBR and GGM methods performed as well if not better than the more complex Bayesian Network approaches.

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تاریخ انتشار 2008