Although one would think that the basic concepts of statistics should be the same across all sciences, there is an amazing heterogeneity between fields in how statistics is taught and practiced. One example are the validity concepts (e.g. construct validity, internal validity, external validity) that are heavily taught in the social sciences and economics (see…
A guest post by Carsten F. Dormann Over the last years, I have been using null models more often than I liked. I had to, when there was no other way to figure out if an ecological pattern was unexpected, or trivial. Inspired by some recent (and also some older) posts, I thought I might throw around…
There’s been too many interesting papers in the last weeks for a lone blogger to cover, so I’m glad that other interesting stuff has been discussed elsewhere, e.g. by EEB & flow on the controversy around “Novel Ecosystems”, NIBMS explaining us why there may be no species below 1 mm, and Nature reporting on the…
… but does “model-free” forecasting really outperform the “true” model? I’ve been busy in the last while, which is both the reason why it has been quiet on this blog and why I didn’t manage to write earlier about a note that we submitted three weeks ago to the arXiv. The note responds to a…
Approximate Bayesian Computing and similar techniques, which are based on calculating approximate likelihood values based on samples from a stochastic simulation model, have attracted a lot of attention in the last years, owing to their promise to provide a general statistical technique for stochastic processes of any complexity, without the limitations that apply to “traditional”…
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. (From “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933.) I…
Our new review on statistical inference for stochastic simulation models is now available at Ecology Letters. The paper discusses how approximate likelihood functions can be generated from stochastic simulations. Such simulation-based likelihood approximations are a very general and powerful tool because they allow us to apply statistical methods to a large class of models such…
theoretical ecology 