Title：

The Poisson-lognormal model as a versatile framework for the joint analysis of species abundances

Speaker:

Prof. Mahendra Mariadassou, INRA, France

Time：

December 15, 2020, 15:00-17:00 Beijing time

Teams Meeting Website：http://wstat.cn/teams.html

Abstract: Joint Species Abundance Models (JSDM) provide a general multivariate framework to study the joint abundances of all species from a community. JSDM account for both structuring factors and potential interactions between the species, which is instrumental in disentangling meaningful ecological interactions from mere statistical associations. Modeling the dependency between the species is challenging because of the count-valued nature of abundance data and most JSDM rely on Gaussian latent layer to encode the dependencies between species in a covariance matrix. The multivariate Poisson-lognormal (PLN) model is one such model viewed as a multivariate mixed Poisson regression model. The inference of such models can be solved using variational techniques and convex optimization.