6,511 research outputs found
The ecodist Package for Dissimilarity-based Analysis of Ecological Data
Ecologists are concerned with the relationships between species composition and environmental framework incorporating space explicitly is an extremely flexible tool for answering these questions. The R package ecodist brings together methods for working with dissimilarities, including some not available in other R packages. We present some of the features of ecodist, particularly simple and partial Mantel tests, and make recommendations for their effective use. Although the partial Mantel test is often used to account for the effects of space, the assumption of linearity greatly reduces its effectiveness for complex spatial patterns. We introduce a modification of the Mantel correlogram designed to overcome this restriction and allow consideration of complex nonlinear structures. This extension of the method allows the use of partial multivariate correlograms and tests of relationship between variables at different spatial scales. Some of the possibilities are demonstrated using both artificial data and data from an ongoing study of plant community composition in grazinglands of the northeastern United States.
Network Analysis with the Enron Email Corpus
We use the Enron email corpus to study relationships in a network by applying
six different measures of centrality. Our results came out of an in-semester
undergraduate research seminar. The Enron corpus is well suited to statistical
analyses at all levels of undergraduate education. Through this note's focus on
centrality, students can explore the dependence of statistical models on
initial assumptions and the interplay between centrality measures and
hierarchical ranking, and they can use completed studies as springboards for
future research. The Enron corpus also presents opportunities for research into
many other areas of analysis, including social networks, clustering, and
natural language processing.Comment: in Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 2, 201
Timescale effect estimation in time-series studies of air pollution and health: A Singular Spectrum Analysis approach
A wealth of epidemiological data suggests an association between
mortality/morbidity from pulmonary and cardiovascular adverse events and air
pollution, but uncertainty remains as to the extent implied by those
associations although the abundance of the data. In this paper we describe an
SSA (Singular Spectrum Analysis) based approach in order to decompose the
time-series of particulate matter concentration into a set of exposure
variables, each one representing a different timescale. We implement our
methodology to investigate both acute and long-term effects of
exposure on morbidity from respiratory causes within the urban area of Bari,
Italy.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-EJS123 the Electronic
Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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Multi-dimensional connectivity: a conceptual and mathematical review.
The estimation of functional connectivity between regions of the brain, for example based on statistical dependencies between the time series of activity in each region, has become increasingly important in neuroimaging. Typically, multiple time series (e.g. from each voxel in fMRI data) are first reduced to a single time series that summarises the activity in a region of interest, e.g. by averaging across voxels or by taking the first principal component; an approach we call one-dimensional connectivity. However, this summary approach ignores potential multi-dimensional connectivity between two regions, and a number of recent methods have been proposed to capture such complex dependencies. Here we review the most common multi-dimensional connectivity methods, from an intuitive perspective, from a formal (mathematical) point of view, and through a number of simulated and real (fMRI and MEG) data examples that illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each method. The paper is accompanied with both functions and scripts, which implement each method and reproduce all the examples
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