jsocolar / flocker

flexible occupancy estimation in R
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Standardize names (site, point, unit, etc) across functions and doc #31

Closed jsocolar closed 3 years ago

jsocolar commented 3 years ago

@SimonCMills We should use consistent terminology across our code and our doc. Right now, for example, we have "(visit-)constant covariates" in some places but "unit covariates" in other places.

I propose:

Then we have two options for what to call covariates.

OPTION 1: Covariates are either "visit-constant" or "visit-varying".

OPTION 2: Covariates are either "unit" or "visit".

SimonCMills commented 3 years ago

@jsocolar I think closure-unit works well (perhaps a bit cumbersome, but I can't think of anything better that is sufficiently general).

Of the two options, I prefer option 2. Yes, people will have to read the documentation, but all it requires is being very clear that it's a catch-all term that refers to "site" in a single-species model, and "site:species" in a multispecies model. The only other question is whether visit_covs is sufficiently general, given that you might just as well have spatial replication rather than temporal? Would rep_covs or similar work better?

jsocolar commented 3 years ago

Closed via https://github.com/jsocolar/flocker/commit/8cdde6f2028198698e7e26232aefc2ba0b012177