Reading & Video

Watch the first 15 minutes of the Video and read the selected sections of the paper.

Video

Watch the first 15 minutes of the this video by the lead author of the paper. It provides a nice overview of state space models. Optionally you can watch the next 5 minutes, which provides some discussion of how to evaluate if state space models are performing well. You are not expected to watch the last hour, which is a tutorial for fitting state-space models using a different software package than we will use followed by Q&A.

Reading

Read only the specified sections. Feel free to read more, but these sections are where we’ll focus discussion.

A guide to state–space modeling of ecological time series (specified sections)

• Introduction
• Examples of Ecological SSMs including
  • Read: A toy example: normal dynamic linear modeling
  • Read: Handling nonlinearity
  • Skip the rest of this section including: Joining multiple data streams, Accounting for complex data structure, Accommodating continuous-time processes, Integrating count and categorical data streams, Capturing heterogeneity with random effects, and Modeling discrete state values with hidden Markov models
• SSMs as a Framework for Ecological Time Series
• Fitting SSMs Read just far enough to convince yourself that doing this is technically complicated. If that’s half a paragraph that’s fine
• Conclusion