A maximum entropy approach to species distribution modeling

Steven J. Phillips, Miroslav Dudík, Robert E. Schapire

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1616 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the problem of modeling species geographic distributions, a critical problem in conservation biology. We propose the use of maximum-entropy techniques for this problem, specifically, sequential-update algorithms that can handle a very large number of features. We describe experiments comparing maxent with a standard distribution-modeling tool, called GARP, on a dataset containing observation data for North American breeding birds. We also study how well maxent performs as a function of the number of training examples and training time, analyze the use of regularization to avoid overfitting when the number of examples is small, and explore the interpretability of models constructed using maxent.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings, Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2004
EditorsR. Greiner, D. Schuurmans
Pages655-662
Number of pages8
StatePublished - 2004
Externally publishedYes
EventProceedings, Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2004 - Banff, Alta, Canada
Duration: Jul 4 2004Jul 8 2004

Publication series

NameProceedings, Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2004

Other

OtherProceedings, Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2004
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityBanff, Alta
Period7/4/047/8/04

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

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