Cumulant-based approximation for fast and efficient prediction for species distribution

Abstract

Species distribution modeling plays an important role in estimating the habitat suitability of species using environmental variables. For this purpose, Maxent and the Poisson point process are popular and powerful methods extensively employed across various ecological and biological sciences. However, the computational speed becomes prohibitively slow when using huge background datasets, which is often the case with fine-resolution data or global-scale estimations. To address this problem, we propose a computationally efficient species distribution model using a cumulant-based approximation (CBA) applied to the loss function of $\gamma$-divergence. Additionally, we introduce a sequential estimating algorithm with an $L_1$ penalty to select important environmental variables closely associated with species distribution. The regularized geometric-mean method, derived from the CBA, demonstrates high computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. Moreover, by applying CBA to Maxent, we establish that Maxent and Fisher linear discriminant analysis are equivalent under a normality assumption. This equivalence leads to an highly efficient computational method for estimating species distribution. The effectiveness of our proposed methods is illustrated through simulation studies and by analyzing data on 226 species from the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and 709 Japanese vascular plant species. The computational efficiency of the proposed methods is significantly improved compared to Maxent, while maintaining comparable estimation accuracy. A R package {\tt CBA} is also prepared to provide all programming codes used in simulation studies and real data analysis.