Automated discovery of relationships, models and principles in ecology

Ecological systems are the quintessential complex systems, involving numerous high-order interactions and non-linear relationships. The most commonly used statistical modelling techniques can hardly reflect the complexity of ecological patterns and processes. Finding hidden relationships in complex data is now possible through the use of massive computational power, particularly by means of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, such as evolutionary computation. Here we use symbolic regression (SR), which searches for both the formal structure of equations and the fitting parameters simultaneously, hence providing the required flexibility to characterize complex ecological systems. First, we demonstrate how SR can deal with complex datasets for: 1) modelling species richness; and 2) modelling species spatial distributions. Second, we illustrate how SR can be used to find general models in ecology, by using it to: 3) develop new models for the interspecific abundance-occupancy relationship; 4) develop species richness estimators; and 5) develop the species-area relationship and the general dynamic model of oceanic island biogeography. All the examples suggest that evolving free-form equations purely from data, often without prior human inference or hypotheses, may represent a very powerful tool for ecologists and biogeographers to become aware of hidden relationships and suggest general theoretical principles.