mvabund (version 4.2.1)

mvabund-package: Statistical methods for analysing multivariate abundance data

Description

This package provides tools for a model-based approach to the analysis of multivariate abundance data in ecology (Warton 2011), where 'abundance' should be interpreted loosely - as well as counts you could have presence/absence, ordinal or biomass (via manyany), etc.

There are graphical methods for exploring the properties of data and the community-environment association, flexible regression methods for estimating and making robust inferences about the community-environment association, 'fourth corner models' to explain environmental response as a function of traits, and diagnostic plots to check the appropriateness of a fitted model (Wang et. al 2012).

There is an emphasis on design-based inferences about these models, e.g. bootstrapping rows of residuals via anova calls, or cross-validation across rows, to make multivariate inferences that are robust to failure of assumptions about correlation. Another emphasis is on presenting diagnostic tools to check assumptions, especially via residual plotting.

Details

The key functions available in this package are the following.

For graphical display of the data:

plot.mvabund

draw a range of plots for Multivariate Abundance Data

boxplot.mvabund

draw a range of plots of Model Formulae for Multivariate Abundance Data

meanvar.plot

draw mean-variance plots for Multivariate Abundance Data

For estimating and displaying Linear Models:

manylm

Fitting Linear Models for Multivariate Abundance Data

summary.manylm

summarizie Multivariate Linear Model Fits for Abundance Data

anova.manylm

obtain ANOVA for Multivariate Linear Model Fits for Abundance Data

plot.manylm

plot diagnostics for a manylm Object

For estimating and displaying Generalized Linear Models:

manyglm

fit Generalized Linear Models for Multivariate Abundance Data

summary.manyglm

summarize Multivariate Generalized Linear Model Fits for Abundance Data

anova.manyglm

obtain Analysis of Deviance for Multivariate Generalized Linear Model Fits for Abundance Data

plot.manyglm

plot diagnostics for a manyglm Object

Other generic functions like residuals, predict, AIC can be applied to manyglm objects.

For estimating and displaying 'fourth corner models' with species traits as well as environmental predictors:

traitglm

predict abundance using a GLM as a function of traits as well as environmental variables

anova.traitglm

obtain Analysis of Deviance for a fourth corner model of abundance

Other generic functions like plot, residuals, predict, AIC can be applied to traitglm objects. Note traitglm can work slowly, as it fits a single big model to vectorised data (then wants to resample it when you call anova.traitglm).

For fitting more flexible models:

manyany

simultaneously fit univariate models to each response variable from 'any' input function

anova.manyany

simultaneously test for a community-level effect, comparing two or more manyany objects

glm1path

fit a path of Generalised Linear Models with L1 ('LASSO') penalties

cv.glm1path

choose the value of the L1 penalty in a glm1path fit by cross-validation

Other generic functions like residuals, predict, AIC can be applied to manyany and glm1path objects. These functions also can be on the slow side, especially if all rare species are included.

For providing a data structure:

mvabund

create a mvabund object

mvformula

create Model Formulae for Multivariate Abundance Data

Example datasets:

Tasmania

meiobenthic community data from Tasmania. Used to demonstrate test for interaction.

solberg

solberg species counts with a 3-level treatment factor.

spider

hunting spiders counts from different sites.

tikus

solberg nematode counts from Tikus island.

antTraits

ant counts from Eucalypt forests, with trait measurements.

For more details, see the documentation for any of the individual functions listed above.

References

Brown AM, Warton DI, Andrew NR, Binns M, Cassis G and Gibb H (2014) The fourth corner solution - using species traits to better understand how species traits interact with their environment, Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5, 344-352.

Warton D.I. (2008a). Raw data graphing: an informative but under-utilized tool for the analysis of multivariate abundances. Austral Ecology 33, 290-300.

Warton D.I. (2008b). Penalized normal likelihood and ridge regularization of correlation and covariance matrices. Journal of the American Statistical Association 103, 340-349.

Warton D.I. (2011). Regularized sandwich estimators for analysis of high dimensional data using generalized estimating equations. Biometrics, 67, 116-123.

Warton DI, Shipley B & Hastie T (2015) CATS regression - a model-based approach to studying trait-based community assembly, Methods in Ecology and Evolution 6, 389-398.

Warton D. I., Wright S., and Wang, Y. (2012). Distance-based multivariate analyses confound location and dispersion effects. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 3, 89-101.

Wang Y., Neuman U., Wright S. and Warton D. I. (2012). mvabund: an R package for model-based analysis of multivariate abundance data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 3, 471-473.

See Also

plot.mvabund, meanvar.plot, manyany, manylm, manyglm, traitglm, summary.manylm, anova.manyany, anova.manylm, anova.traitglm, anova.manyglm, plot.manylm

Examples

# NOT RUN {
require(graphics)

## Load the spider dataset:
data(spider)

## Create the mvabund object spiddat:
spiddat <- mvabund(spider$abund)
X <- as.matrix(spider$x)

## Draw a plot of the spider data:
plot(spiddat, col="gray1", n.vars=8, transformation="sqrt", 
xlab=c("Hunting Spider"), ylab="Spider Species", scale.lab="s",
t.lab="t", shift=TRUE, fg= "lightblue", col.main="red", main="Spiders") 


## A mean-variance plot, data organised by year, 
## for 1981 and 1983 only, as in Figure 7a of Warton (2008a):
data(tikus)
tikusdat <- mvabund(tikus$abund)
year <- tikus$x[,1]
is81or83 <- year==81 | year==83
meanvar.plot(tikusdat~year,legend=TRUE, subset=is81or83, col=c(1,10)) 	

## Create a formula for multivariate abundance data:
foo <- mvformula( spiddat~X )

## Create a List of Univariate Formulas:
fooUni <- formulaUnimva(spiddat~X)
fooUniInt <- formulaUnimva(spiddat~X, intercept=TRUE)

## Find the three variables that best explain the response:
best.r.sq( foo, n.xvars= 3)

## Fit a multivariate linear model:
foo <- mvformula( spiddat~X )
lm.spider <- manylm(foo)

## Plot Diagnostics for a multivariate linear model:
plot(lm.spider,which=1:2,col.main="red",cex=3,overlay=FALSE)

## Obtain a summary of test statistics using residual resampling:
summary(lm.spider, nBoot=500)

## Calculate a ANOVA Table:
anova(lm.spider, nBoot=500)

# }