PhD student Braden Scherting won the best poster award at the 2024 International Statistical Ecology Conference in Swansea, Wales for his presentation “Interpretable ecological community modeling for observed abundance.” Braden worked with Professor David Dunson to introduce a new class of joint species distribution model (JSDM) for abundance data based on sparse, nonnegative matrix factorization adapted to accommodate a variety of dependence structures. The method enables researchers to learn low-dimensional, interpretable summaries of each species and sample while preserving the regression and spatial smoothing properties of popular JSDMs.
Congratulations, Braden!
