TESTING ECOLOGICAL THEORY USING THE INFORMATION-THEORETIC APPROACH: EXAMPLES AND CAUTIONARY RESULTS

Ecologists are increasingly applying model selection to their data analyses, primarily to compare regression models. Model selection can also be used to compare mechanistic models derived from ecological theory, thereby providing a formal framework for testing the theory. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) is the most commonly adopted criterion used to compare models; however, its performance in general is not very well known. The best model according to AIC has the smallest expected Kullback-Leibler (K-L) distance, which is an information-theoretic measure of the difference between a model and the truth. I review the theory behind AIC and demonstrate how it can be used to test ecological theory by…

• IR
  Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China