Statistical tools for water quality assessment and monitoring in river ecosystems – a scoping review and recommendations for data analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Robust scientific inference is crucial to ensure evidence-based decision making. Accordingly, the selection of appropriate statistical tools and experimental designs is integral to achieve accuracy from data analytical processes. Environmental monitoring of water quality has become increasingly common and widespread as a result of technological advances, leading to an abundance of datasets. We conducted a scoping review of the water quality literature and found that correlation and linear regression are by far the most used statistical tools. However, the accuracy of inferences drawn from ordinary least squares (OLS) techniques depends on a set of assumptions, most prominently: (a) independence among observations, (b) normally distributed errors, (c) equal variances of errors, and (d) balanced designs. Environmental data, however, are often faced with temporal and spatial dependencies, and unbalanced designs, thus making OLS techniques not suitable to provide valid statistical inferences. Generalized least squares (GLS), linear mixed-effect models (LMMs), and generalized linear mixed-effect models (GLMMs), as well as Bayesian data analyses, have been developed to better tackle these problems. Recent progress in the development of statistical software has made these approaches more accessible and user-friendly. We provide a high-level summary and practical guidance for those statistical techniques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.049 | 0.107 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.023 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".