Volume no :2, Issue no: 2, December (2009)

IMPROVEMENT IN MODELLING AND PREDICTING SOME PREDATOR-PREY POPULATIONS

Author's: Sévérien Nkurunziza
Pages: [159] - [184]
Received Date: November 25, 2009
Submitted by:

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in the estimation and the prediction problems for a cyclic predator-prey populations described by the Lotka-Volterra ODE system, for which the parameters of the ODE are some functions of time. To this end, we view the actual population sizes as random perturbations of the solutions to the ODE system, where these perturbations follow correlated Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. By using certain re-parameterization result, we show how to estimate the parameters and how to predict the population sizes. Finally, we analyze two data sets in order to illustrate the application of the suggested approach.

Keywords

Lotka-Volterra ODE, interacting predator-prey species, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.