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Record W4408349135 · doi:10.1002/ece3.71090

<scp>QFASA</scp>: A Comprehensive R Package for Diet Estimation via Fatty Acid Signature Analysis

2025· article· en· W4408349135 on OpenAlexafffund
Connie Stewart, Justin Kamerman, Jennifer McNichol, Holly Steeves, Tyler Rideout

Bibliographic record

VenueEcology and Evolution · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicIsotope Analysis in Ecology
Canadian institutionsWestern UniversitySimon Fraser UniversityUniversity of New Brunswick
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsR packageInferenceStatistical inferenceComputer scienceSignature (topology)EstimationKey (lock)Data miningVariety (cybernetics)Range (aeronautics)StatisticsMathematicsArtificial intelligenceEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) is a well-established diet estimation method that has been used extensively on a wide variety of marine mammal species. The method, along with its new refinements and extensions, requires the use of statistically intricate tools, many of which are computationally demanding. Recent developments in QFASA include a maximum likelihood framework for diet estimation, statistically valid inference procedures such as confidence intervals for the diet and hypothesis tests for comparing fatty acid signatures and/or diets, a measure of repeatability in the diet estimates, a prey species selection algorithm, as well as novel ways to estimate calibration coefficients, which are used to improve accuracy in the estimates. The QFASA R package was developed to facilitate access to the latest statistical QFASA tools and provide a means of efficiently disseminating new QFASA-related research, often developed by statisticians in collaboration with biologists. Further, using up-to-date functions ensures that QFASA methods are being applied in a legitimate and consistent manner. In this work, we present the QFASA R package, highlighting key functions for diet estimation and demonstrating their use with sample data available in the package. The QFASA R package is user-friendly, offers a broad range of functionality, and the vast majority of the functions are unique to this package.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.028
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Software · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.114
Threshold uncertainty score0.381

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.028
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0030.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.003
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0040.003
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.1140.090

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.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.234
Teacher spread0.228 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreSoftware

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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