Ecological interactions and the Netflix problem

PeerJ. 2017 Aug 10:5:e3644. doi: 10.7717/peerj.3644. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Species interactions are a key component of ecosystems but we generally have an incomplete picture of who-eats-who in a given community. Different techniques have been devised to predict species interactions using theoretical models or abundances. Here, we explore the K nearest neighbour approach, with a special emphasis on recommendation, along with a supervised machine learning technique. Recommenders are algorithms developed for companies like Netflix to predict whether a customer will like a product given the preferences of similar customers. These machine learning techniques are well-suited to study binary ecological interactions since they focus on positive-only data. By removing a prey from a predator, we find that recommenders can guess the missing prey around 50% of the times on the first try, with up to 881 possibilities. Traits do not improve significantly the results for the K nearest neighbour, although a simple test with a supervised learning approach (random forests) show we can predict interactions with high accuracy using only three traits per species. This result shows that binary interactions can be predicted without regard to the ecological community given only three variables: body mass and two variables for the species' phylogeny. These techniques are complementary, as recommenders can predict interactions in the absence of traits, using only information about other species' interactions, while supervised learning algorithms such as random forests base their predictions on traits only but do not exploit other species' interactions. Further work should focus on developing custom similarity measures specialized for ecology to improve the KNN algorithms and using richer data to capture indirect relationships between species.

Keywords: Ecology; Food web; Species interactions.

Grants and funding

PDP was funded by an Alexander Graham Bell Graduate Scholarship from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, an Azure for Research award from Microsoft, and benefited from the Hardware Donation Program from NVIDIA. DG is funded by the Canada Research Chair program and NSERC Discovery grant. TP is funded by an NSERC Discovery grant and an FQRNT Nouveau Chercheur grants. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.