A gentle introduction to quantile regression for ecologists

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America R is a common statistical method employed by scientists to investigate relationships between variables. Quantile regression (Koenker and Bassett 1978) is a method for estimating functional relations between variables for all portions of a probability distribution. Although it has begun to be used in ecology and biology (Table 1), many ecologists remain unaware of it, as it was developed relatively recently and is rarely taught in statistics courses at many universities. We present this introduction both to encourage additional applications in ecology and to educate those who are already contemplating using the method. Typically, a response variable y is some function of predictor variables X, so that y = f(X). Most regression applications in the ecological sciences focus on estimating rates of change in the mean of the response variable distribution as some function of a set of predictor variables; in other words, the function is defined for the expected value of y conditional on X, E(y|X). Mosteller and Tukey (1977) noted that it was possible to fit regression curves to other parts of the distribution of the response variable, but that this was rarely done, and therefore most regression analyses gave an incomplete picture of the relationships between variables. This is especially problematic for regression models with heterogeneous variances, which are common in ecology. A regression model with heterogeneous variances implies that there is not a single rate of change that characterizes changes in the probability distributions. Focusing exclusively on changes in the means may underestimate, overestimate, or fail to distinguish real nonzero changes in heterogeneous distributions (Terrell et al. 1996; Cade et al. 1999). The Dunham et al. (2002) analyses relating the abundance of Lahontan cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki henshawi) to the ratio of stream width to depth illustrates the value of the additional information provided by quantile regression (Figure 1). The ratio was used as a predictor variable because it was an easily obtained measure of channel morphology that was thought to be related to the integrity of habitat in small streams like those typically inhabited by cutthroat trout. Quantile regression estimates indicated a nonlinear, negative relationship with the upper 30% (≥ 70th percentiles, P ≤ 0.10 for H0: 1 = 0) of cutthroat densities across 13 streams and 7 years. A weighted least squares regression estimated zero change (90% confidence intervals of –0.014 to 0.012, P = 0.901 for H0: 1 = 0) in mean densities with stream width to depth. If the authors REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS