G. GILIOLI, S. PASQUALI, F. RUGGERI
Bayesian inference for functional
response in a stochastic predator-prey system
CNR-IMATI
Technical Report 2005 - MI/8.
The paper deals with Bayesian inference in a discretely observed
stochastic
predator-prey model. The dynamics of the model is described by a system
of stochastic differential equations where the noise term summarizes
both demographic and environmental stochasticity. We focus on the
estimation of a behavioural parameter appearing in the functional
response of a predator to the prey abundance when only few observations
are available. Latent data are introduced between each pair of
observations and are considered as missing data. An
MCMC algorithm is used to sample from the posterior distribution
of the parameter of interest. The method is then applied to both
simulated and real data and results for different numbers of latent
data are compared with those
obtained following a frequentist approach. As a case study we consider
an acarine predator-prey system relevant to biological control problems.