Benchmarking Jordanian Coral-Reef Fish Biodiversity with Reef Physical Properties and Biotic Factors

Capstone project for 2016 Summer Ecosystem Experience for Undergraduates (SEE-U) in Jordan

Contents:

• Cross-validated Ridge and lasso regression models that predict indicators of coral-reef-fish biodiversity using data from Wagner et al. (https://peerj.com/articles/1459/)
• Cross-validated the models on my own field-collected data
• Visualized model performance under different lambda values (strengths) of different regularization terms

Point of Improvement: For the field-collected data, I was unable to create a validation set to optimize hyperparameters using out-of-sample data, due to the very low sample size (N=5)

Directed by

• Professor Jenna Mara Lawrence of Columbia University and
• Doctor Suzanne Macey of American Museum of Natural History

Courtesy of Jordan Marine Science Station