Investigating Morphospace Occupation in Multi-Scale Ecological and Evolutionary Data Using Regression Tree: Case Studies and Perspectives
Evolutionary Biology, ISSN: 0071-3260, Vol: 44, Issue: 1, Page: 120-134
2017
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- 39Captures
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Example: if you select the 1-year option for an article published in 2019 and a metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019. If you select the 3-year option for the same article published in 2019 and the metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
Citation Benchmarking is provided by Scopus and SciVal and is different from the metrics context provided by PlumX Metrics.
Article Description
A key challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology is to explain the origin, structure and temporal patterns of phenotypic diversity. With regard to the potentially complex determinism of phenotypic differences, the issue should be comprehended in a general view, across multiple scales and an increasing number of phenomic studies investigate shape variation through large taxonomic, biogeographic or temporal scales. In this context, there is an ever-increasing need to develop new tools for a coherent understanding of morphospace occupation by disentangling and quantifying the main determinants of phenotypic changes. The present study briefly introduce the possibility to use multivariate regression tree technique to cope with morphological data, as embedded in a geometric morphometric framework. It emphasizes that hierarchical partitioning methods produce a hierarchy between causal variables that may help analyzing complexity in multi-scale ecological and evolutionary data. I therefore suggest that morphological studies would benefit from the combined use of the classical statistical models with rapidly emerging and diversifying methods of machine-learning. Doing so allows one to primary explore in an extensive exploratory manner the hierarchy of nested organisational levels underlying morphological variation, and then conduct hypothesis-driven analysis by focusing on a relevant scale or by investigating the appropriate model that reflects hypothesized nested influence of explanatory variables. The outlined approach may help investigating morphospace occupation in an explicitly hierarchical quantitative context.
Bibliographic Details
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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