<commit_before>---
layout: science
category: science
title: 'Random Dot Product Graphs for Food Webs'
published: TRUE
author: gvdr
date: 2015-09-28 10:45
tags: [Food Webs, Evolution, Random Graphs, Phylogenetic Signal]
---

Mine and <NAME>'s paper on how to assess the evolutionary signal of food
webs is out on Oikos as an Early View.

<img src="/images/RDPGmodel.png" style="float: left"  width="70%" title="A simple model of a toy food with three species (a, b, c) and their RDPG representation.">

In the paper, we explore some ideas on how to deploy the Random Dot Product Graphs
models for food webs. The RDPG framework offers the possibility of moving some
questions about the evolution of food webs from a quite rigid, binary framework
(that is, the classic interactions matrix representation) to a metric space of
species' abstract functional traits (estimated from that matrix
representation). This offers analytical advantages, for example the possibility
of speaking about *gradual* changes in a food web structure.

_We are eager to hear your opinion about the proposed approach, and happy to work on future application and developments!_

##Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that an appropriate model for food webs, the
network of feeding links in a community of species, should take into account
the inherent variability of ecological interactions. Harnessing this
variability, we will show that it is useful to interpret empirically observed
food webs as realisations of a family of stochastic processes, namely random
dot-product graph models. These models provide an ideal extension of food-web
models beyond the limitations of current deterministic or partially
probabilistic models. As an additional beneﬁt, our RDPG framework enables us to<commit_msg>image for blog<commit_after>---
layout: science
category: science
title: 'Random Dot Product Graphs for Food Webs'
published: TRUE
author: gvdr
date: 2015-09-28 10:45
tags: [Food Webs, Evolution, Random Graphs, Phylogenetic Signal]
---

Mine and <NAME>'s [paper](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/oik.02305/full) on how to assess the evolutionary signal of food
webs is out on Oikos as an Early View.

<img src="/images/RDPGmodel.png" style="float: left"  width="70%" title="A simple model of a toy food with three species (a, b, c) and their RDPG representation.">

In the paper, we explore some ideas on how to deploy the Random Dot Product Graphs
models for food webs. The RDPG framework offers the possibility of moving some
questions about the evolution of food webs from a quite rigid, binary framework
(that is, the classic interactions matrix representation) to a metric space of
species' abstract functional traits (estimated from that matrix
representation). This offers analytical advantages, for example the possibility
of speaking about *gradual* changes in a food web structure.

_We are eager to hear your opinion about the proposed approach, and happy to work on future application and developments!_

##Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that an appropriate model for food webs, the
network of feeding links in a community of species, should take into account
the inherent variability of ecological interactions. Harnessing this
variability, we will show that it is useful to interpret empirically observed
food webs as realisations of a family of stochastic processes, namely random
dot-product graph models. These models provide an ideal extension of food-web
models beyond the limitations of current deterministic or partially
probabilistic models. As an additional beneﬁt, our RDPG framework enables us to
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