|
On Wednesday, June 15, Princeton University's Rob Schapire will offer a lecture titled "A Maximum Entropy Approach to Species Distribution Modeling." The lecture will be held in room 750 of the Schapiro Center from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The modeling of the geographic distribution of a plant or animal species is a critical problem in conservation biology: to save a threatened species, one first needs to know where it prefers to live, and what its requirements are for survival. Schapire proposes the use of maximum-entropy methods for this challenging problem, a set of decades-old techniques, which he proves have a strong theoretical performance guarantees.
Schapire will describe a number of experiments comparing maximum-entropy with a standard distribution-modeling tool, called GARP, for several different animal species. The talk will include joint work with Steven Phillips, Robert Anderson and Miroslav Dudik. | 
