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Seed Choice for Fitting Gaussian Mixture Models of Instar Characteristics in Lepidopterans

Abstract Number:

2874 

Submission Type:

Contributed Abstract 

Contributed Abstract Type:

Poster 

Participants:

Catherine Durso (1), Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen (2), Dhaval Vayas (2), Audrey Mitchell (2), Shannon Murphy (2)

Institutions:

(1) University of Denver, N/A, (2) Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver, United States

Co-Author(s):

Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen  
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver
Dhaval Vayas  
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver
Audrey Mitchell  
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver
Shannon Murphy  
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Denver

First Author:

Catherine Durso  
University of Denver

Presenting Author:

Catherine Durso  
University of Denver

Abstract Text:

Estimation of a lepidopteran's instar prior to pupation has applications in applied research. We modeled successive larval instars for the study species Hyphantria cunea based on head capsule width data using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) fit by Estimation-Maximization (EM). To generate starting values under the assumption of n instars, we calculated n head capsule widths consistent with Brooks-Dyar spacing with the smallest value positioned at a small quantile q1 of the observed head capsule widths and the largest value positioned at a large quantile qn of the observed widths. We used the means of the n resulting clusters as starting values for the means of the Gaussian distributions, the variances of the head capsule widths in each cluster as starting values for the variances of the Gaussian distributions, and the proportions in each cluster as starting values for the mixing proportions of the Gaussian distributions. We used Brooks-Dyar spacing to select the number of instars. We found that this form of seed, in contrast to other methods of generating seeds, produces reliable, rapid convergence of the EM algorithm to biologically reasonable models.

Keywords:

Brooks-Dyar’s rule|Gaussian mixture model|instar|EM seed| |

Sponsors:

Section on Statistics and the Environment

Tracks:

Ecology

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