The canonical OMI analysis is similar to the function niche
,
from the package ade4
. The principle of this analysis is the
following. A set of N resource units (RUs) are available to the
animals of the study. Each resource unit is described by P
environmental variables. Therefore, the N resource units define a
cloud of N points in the P-dimensionnal space defined by the P
variables. We call this space "ecological space".
Moreover, the use of the N resource units is known (or sampled) for
a sample of K animals (e.g., using radio-tracking). These utilization
weights for each RU (rows) and each animal (column) define a table
Y
. For a given animal, the set of resource units used define
the "niche" of the animal. The vector connecting the centroid (mean)
of the available RUs to the centroid of the RUs used by this animal is
named "marginality vector" (and its squared length is named
"marginality" or "outlying mean index").
The canomi
first distorts the ecological space so that the
available resource units take a standard spherical shape (by first
performing a principal component analysis). Then, in this distorted
space, a non-centred principal component analysis of the marginality
vectors is performed. The canonical OMI analysis finds the directions
in the distorted ecological space where the marginality is, in
average, the largest.