The Jensen effect and functional single index models: estimating the ecological implications of nonlinear reaction norms

DOI10.1214/20-AOAS1349MaRDI QIDQ2044256zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Zi Ye, Giles Hooker, Stephen P. Ellner

Publication date 4 August 2021

Published in The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01864, https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1600454868

zbMATH Keywords

functional data analysisJensen effectreaction normsingle index modelsizer

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Density estimation (62G07) Nonparametric regression and quantile regression (62G08) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12) Functional data analysis (62R10)

Abstract: This paper develops tools to characterize how species are affected by environmental variability, based on a functional single index model relating a response such as growth rate or survival to environmental conditions. In ecology, the curvature of such responses are used, via Jensen's inequality, to determine whether environmental variability is harmful or beneficial, and differing nonlinear responses to environmental variability can contribute to the coexistence of competing species. Here, we address estimation and inference for these models with observational data on individual responses to environmental conditions. Because nonparametric estimation of the curvature (second derivative) in a nonparametric functional single index model requires unrealistic sample sizes, we instead focus on directly estimating the effect of the nonlinearity, by comparing the average response to a variable environment with the response at the expected environment, which we call the Jensen Effect. We develop a test statistic to assess whether this effect is significantly different from zero. In doing so we re-interpret the SiZer method of Chaudhuri and Marron (1995) by maximizing a test statistic over smoothing parameters. We show that our proposed method works well both in simulations and on real ecological data from the long-term data set described in Drake (2005).

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Cites work

• Direct estimation of the index coefficient in a single-index model
• Estimation and inference in functional single-index models
• Functional Data Analysis with R and MATLAB
• General theory of competitive coexistence in spatially-varying environments.
• Multispecies competition in variable environments
• Optimal smoothing in single-index models
• Semiparametric least squares (SLS) and weighted SLS estimation of single-index models
• Semiparametric Regression
• Single and multiple index functional regression models with nonparametric link
• SiZer for Exploration of Structures in Curves
• SiZer for smoothing splines
• Sliced Inverse Regression for Dimension Reduction

Cited in

(2)

• Generalized single index models and Jensen effects on reproduction and survival
• Local quadratic estimation of the curvature in a functional single index model

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• SemiPar
• SiZer
• SiZer

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