Extending the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to presence/absence data: A case study on North American breeding birds and biogeographical shifts expected from climate change.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how species composition varies across space and time is fundamental to ecology. While multiple methods having been created to characterize this variation through the identification of groups of species that tend to co-occur, most of these methods unfortunately are not able to represent gradual variation in species composition. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is a mixed-membership method that can represent gradual changes in community structure by delineating overlapping groups of species, but its use has been limited because it requires abundance data and requires users to a priori set the number of groups. We substantially extend LDA to accommodate widely available presence/absence data and to simultaneously determine the optimal number of groups. Using simulated

SUBMITTER: Valle D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7165608 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature