I have data of changes in the dry weight of two organisms over the time of incubation. By simply plotting it together with respect to time I observe oscillations of "predator-prey" (maybe...) type. However, I am not sure if those oscillations TRULY are the "predator-prey"-type, and instead demonstrate a completely different relationship. Does anybody know how to check the fitness of the data to predator-prey model?
You could fit a Lotka-Volterra model to your data and see how closely it is able to recreate the observed dynamics.
If you have a reasonable amount of data one way of checking the fit would be to fit the model to the first half of your data, and then see how closely your fitted model predicts the second half of the data.
James, but how exactly do you fit the data to the model? Any place I can look this up? A MATLAB code? An Excell way?
Something like least-squares minimisation in the programming language of your choice would do it. There seems to be Matlab code to do exactly what you want here - http://jmahaffy.sdsu.edu/courses/f09/math636/lectures/lotka/qualde2.html#fitparameter
Hello Anna! I have a similar problem.....Did you manage to come up with LV parameters that corresponds with your data?
if yes! Please show me ........
Theko Nyawo : I didn't. The Matlab scripts that I found were not helping (attaching here). Then eventually I re-checked the measuring procedure I used to quantify the organisms and noticed it was introducing those "oscillations", artificially.
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