Title
Learning Seasonal Phytoplankton Communities with Topic Moldes.
Abstract
In this work we develop and demonstrate a probabilistic generative model for phytoplankton communities. The proposed model takes counts of a set of phytoplankton taxa in a timeseries as its training data, and models communities by learning sparse co-occurrence structure between the taxa. Our model is probabilistic, where communities are represented by probability distributions over the species, and each time-step is represented by a probability distribution over the communities. The proposed approach uses a non-parametric, spatiotemporal topic model to encourage the communities to form an interpretable representation of the data, without making strong assumptions about the communities. We demonstrate the quality and interpretability of our method by its ability to improve performance of a simplistic regression model. We show that simple linear regression is sufficient to predict the community distribution learned by our method, and therefore the taxon distributions, from a set of naively chosen environment variables. In contrast, a similar regression model is insufficient to predict the taxon distributions directly or through PCA with the same level of accuracy.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
OCEANS-IEEE
Time series,Interpretability,Regression analysis,Probability distribution,Simple linear regression,Probabilistic logic,Topic model,Statistics,Taxon,Mathematics
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Journal
abs/1711.09013
0197-7385
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
1
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arnold Kalmbach1233.39
Heidi M. Sosik251.53
Gregory Dudek32163255.48
Yogesh Girdhar46410.31