arXiv subjects

Mevin B Hooten

Publications and source records attributed to Mevin B Hooten.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Composite Dyadic Models for Spatio-Temporal Data

Mechanistic statistical models are commonly used to study the flow of biological processes. For example, in landscape genetics, the aim is to infer spatial mechanisms that govern gene flow in populations. Existing statistical approaches in landscape genetics do not account for temporal dependence in the data and may be computationally prohibitive. We infer mechanisms with a Bayesian hierarchical dyadic model that scales well with large data sets and that accounts for spatial and temporal dependence. We construct a fully-connected network comprising spatio-temporal data for the dyadic model and use normalized composite likelihoods to account for the dependence structure in space and time. We develop a dyadic model to account for physical mechanisms commonly found in physical-statistical models and apply our methods to ancient human DNA data to infer the mechanisms that affected human movement in Bronze Age Europe.

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arXiv2024

Geostatistical capture-recapture models

Methods for population estimation and inference have evolved over the past decade to allow for the incorporation of spatial information when using capture-recapture study designs. Traditional approaches to specifying spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models often rely on an individual-based detection function that decays as a detection location is farther from an individual's activity center. Traditional SCR models are intuitive because they incorporate mechanisms of animal space use based on their assumptions about activity centers. We modify the SCR model to accommodate a wide range of space use patterns, including for those individuals that may exhibit traditional elliptical utilization distributions. Our approach uses underlying Gaussian processes to characterize the space use of individuals. This allows us to account for multimodal and other complex space use patterns that may arise due to movement. We refer to this class of models as geostatistical capture-recapture (GCR) models. We adapt a recursive computing strategy to fit GCR models to data in stages, some of which can be parallelized. This technique facilitates implementation and leverages modern multicore and distributed computing environments. We demonstrate the application of GCR models by analyzing both simulated data and a data set involving capture histories of snowshoe hares in central Colorado, USA.

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arXiv2023

Multistage Hierarchical Capture-Recapture Models

Ecologists increasingly rely on Bayesian methods to fit capture-recapture models. Capture-recapture models are used to estimate abundance while accounting for imperfect detectability in individual-level data. A variety of implementations exist for such models, including integrated likelihood, parameter-expanded data augmentation, and combinations of those. Capture-recapture models with latent random effects can be computationally intensive to fit using conventional Bayesian algorithms. We identify alternative specifications of capture-recapture models by considering a conditional representation of the model structure. The resulting alternative model can be specified in a way that leads to more stable computation and allows us to fit the desired model in stages while leveraging parallel computing resources. Our model specification includes a component for the capture history of detected individuals and another component for the sample size which is random before observed. We demonstrate this approach using three examples including simulation and two data sets resulting from capture-recapture studies of different species.

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