5. Stochastic Simulation and Power Analysis
Benjamin M. Bolker · Princeton University Press eBooks · 2008
This chapter introduces techniques and ideas related to simulating ecological patterns.Its main goals are: (1) to show you how to generate patterns you can use to sharpen your intuition and test your estimation tools; and (2) to introduce statistical power and related concepts, and show you how to estimate statistical power by simulation.This chapter and the supplements will also give you more practice working with R. * Dynamic processes are more challenging.See Chapter ??. * Non-linear least-squares fitting assumes constant, normally distributed error, ignoring the fact that the data are really binomially distributed.Chapter ?? will present more sophisticated maximum likelihood approaches to this problem.