Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is an umbrella term for a class of algorithms and ideas that allow performing an approximate estimation of the likelihood / posterior for stochastic simulation models when the likelihood cannot be explicitly calculated (intractable likelihood). To give you the idea in a nutshell: to approximate the likelihood, consider that for a…
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…
I just returned from Tromø, Norway, from a workshop on “modeling marine systems from first principles”. I should probably concentrate on the scientific part here, but I feel I can’t go there before saying that the venue was stunning – the meeting was organized at Sommarøy, a small island close to Tromø, and for the…
A comment on a recent post gave me the motivation to try out the new EasyABC package for R, developed by Franck Jabot, Thierry Faure, Nicolas Dumoulin and maintained by Nicolas Dumoulin. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a relatively new method that allows treating any stochastic model (IBM, stochastic population model, …) in a statistical…
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”…
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 