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gvdr / Daedalus-web

Are Food Webs complex? And what does even mean to be complex?
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Information theory #1

Open tpoisot opened 7 years ago

tpoisot commented 7 years ago

I'd like to do some information theory things in this paper -- which networks have more informativity? What is the distribution of species contributions? ...

gvdr commented 7 years ago

Yes, this is a good point.

There's some previous work about information complexity in networks (i.e. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437108000319) and also about ecosystems (I think it goes under the "ecosystem maturity" label).

A related subgoal would be to explain what the informativity of an ecological network means and why we should / should not care about it.

gvdr commented 7 years ago

That said, I see one possible approach like this: (1) we choose a set of complexity measures; (2) we collect from mangal all of the comparable food web (i.e., food webs with the same kind of interaction) along a (latitudinal) gradient; (3) if we chose bipartite webs (as likely), we transform them into their 2 unipartite projections; (4) we compute the set of complexities along the gradient; (5) we see if there's a significant trend (and if it matches the one expected by theory/intuition).

How do you see that?