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Mathematical Tools For Forecasting Stock Market Work For Ecology Too

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Animal populations and the stock market are hard to forecast. Both are generated by complicated, interdependent systems.

Unlike financial stocks, where trades are meticulously recorded, scientists began estimating animal populations only a few decades ago. But a new technique makes it possible to use the same tools some banks use to forecast the stock market and apply them to ecology.

The newly developed "Dewdrop Regression" can forecast fish populations with 3% the data previously required through other methods, according to Hsieh, Anderson, and Sugihara in an article appearing in The American Naturalist.
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Returning to academia and ecology, "I realized that even great ecologists were working with time series only a few tens of points long," Sugihara said. To apply data-hungry techniques to short time series, Hsieh et al. take data from several species collected simultaneously over a few years and stitch them together. A few test manipulations need to be applied; but when done properly, the technique is able to forecast with 15-20 points instead of 1,000. "You're doing significantly better than chance within four years," said Anderson.

But does it work for real world ecological problems? Using 40-year time series from 23 California fish species, Hsieh et al. showed that though they were <10%>60% predictable with the new procedure, combined with others from the same habitat. "When you consider that we're predicting the change, not just raw abundance, this accuracy becomes very exciting," Anderson said.