Summary
The practical elicitation of expert beliefs about logistic regression models is considered. An experiment is reported in which ecologists quantified their prior beliefs about the relationship between various environmental attributes and the habitat distribution of certain rare and endangered fauna. Prior distributions were elicited from the ecologists and combined with sample data to form posterior distributions. The elicitation method was proposed by Garthwaite and Al-Awadhi (2004) and is implemented through an interactive graphical computer program. Classical stepwise logistic regression and alternative forms of prior distribution are compared using cross validation. Data on the environmental attributes have been mapped and stored in a GIS database and the posterior distributions can be used to predict the probability of a species’ presence/absence at any site in the database.
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Acknowledgements
The work reported here was supported by Kuwait University (Grant No SS03/02) and the Department of Natural Resources, Queensland. We are grateful to the ecologists whose opinions were quantified, Graeme Bell, who extracted the GIS data, and Teresa Eyre, who supplied the sample data.
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Al-Awadhi, S.A., Garthwaite, P.H. Quantifying expert opinion for modelling fauna habitat distributions. Computational Statistics 21, 121–140 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-006-0255-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-006-0255-x