2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
A Spatio-temporal Bayesian Network Approach for Revealing Functional Ecological Networks in Fisheries
Authors : Neda Trifonova, Daniel Duplisea, Andrew Kenny, Allan Tucker
Published in: Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XIII
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Ecosystems consist of complex dynamic interactions among species and the environment, the understanding of which has implications for predicting the environmental response to changes in climate and biodiversity. Machine learning techniques can allow such complex, spatially varying interactions to be recovered from collected field data. In this study, we apply structure learning techniques to identify functional relationships between trophic groups of species that vary across space and time. Specifically, Bayesian networks are created on a
window of data
for each of the 20
geographically
different and
temporally
varied sub-regions within an oceanic area. In addition, we explored the
spatial
and
temporal
variation of
pre-defined functions
(like predation, competition) that are generalisable by experts’ knowledge. We were able to discover meaningful ecological networks that were more precisely
spatially-specific
rather than temporally, as previously suggested for this region. To validate the discovered networks, we predict the biomass of the trophic groups by using dynamic Bayesian networks, and correcting for spatial autocorrelation by including a
spatial node
in our models.