TITLE:
Stable Isotope Sourcing Using Sampling
AUTHORS:
Erik B. Erhardt, Blair O. Wolf, Merav Ben-David, Edward J. Bedrick
KEYWORDS:
SISUS, IsoSource, Mixing Model, Animal Ecology, Markov Chain Monte Carlo
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Ecology,
Vol.4 No.6,
May
23,
2014
ABSTRACT: Stable isotope
mixing models are used to estimate proportional contributions of sources to a
mixture, such as in the analysis of animal diets, plant nutrient use,
geochemistry, pollution, and forensics. We describe an algorithm implemented as
SISUS software for providing a user-specified number of probabilistic exact
solutions derived quickly from the extended mixing model. Our method
outperforms IsoSource [1],
a deterministic algorithm for providing approximate solutions to represent the
solution polytope. Our method is an approximate Bayesian large sample procedure.
SISUS software is freely available at StatAcumen.com/sisus and as an R package
at cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sisus.