Title
Using maximum topology matching to explore differences in species distribution models
Date Issued
08 March 2016
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Doraiswamy H.
Talbert M.
Morisette J.
Silva C.T.
New York University
Publisher(s)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Abstract
Species distribution models (SDM) are used to help understand what drives the distribution of various plant and animal species. These models are typically high dimensional scalar functions, where the dimensions of the domain correspond to predictor variables of the model algorithm. Understanding and exploring the differences between models help ecologists understand areas where their data or understanding of the system is incomplete and will help guide further investigation in these regions. These differences can also indicate an important source of model to model uncertainty. However, it is cumbersome and often impractical to perform this analysis using existing tools, which allows for manual exploration of the models usually as 1-dimensional curves. In this paper, we propose a topology-based framework to help ecologists explore the differences in various SDMs directly in the high dimensional domain. In order to accomplish this, we introduce the concept of maximum topology matching that computes a locality-aware correspondence between similar extrema of two scalar functions. The matching is then used to compute the similarity between two functions. We also design a visualization interface that allows ecologists to explore SDMs using their topological features and to study the differences between pairs of models found using maximum topological matching. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework through several use cases using different data sets and report the feedback obtained from ecologists.
Start page
9
End page
16
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Geociencias, Multidisciplinar Geología
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84966455217
Resource of which it is part
2015 IEEE Scientific Visualization Conference, SciVis 2015 - Proceedings
ISBN of the container
9781467397858
Conference
IEEE Scientific Visualization Conference, SciVis 2015
Sponsor(s)
This work was supported in part by a Google Faculty Award, an IBM Faculty Award, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at NYU, the NYU School of Engineering, the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, AT&T, NSF award CNS-1229185, DOE, and the NASA Biodiversity Program award NNH11AS091. MT and JM's contribution was funded by the Department of the Interior North Central Climate Science Center. Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus