Counting co-occurrence matrices and its
application to community ecology
|
Yung-Pin Chen
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Lewis and Clark College
|
|
Abstract: Ecologists use co-occurrence matrices to
record the presence or absence of certain
species in different habitats. They often
ask what patterns to expect if the species
distributed themselves randomly. This requires
counting the number of distinct co-occurrence
matrices with fixed row and column sums. I
shall introduce and discuss some combinatorial
and statistical ideas to that quest. In particular,
I will describe how to use Markov chain Monte
Carlo to approach this counting problem.
|