Generating random networks

Users can generate random networks. It is, of course, possible to supply your own. The networks should be presented as matrices of 0 and 1. Internally, befwm will check that there are as many rows as there are columns.

Niche model

Following Williams & Martinez, we have implemented the niche model of food webs. This model represents allometric relationships between preys and predators well, and is therefore well suited to generate random networks.

Random niche model networks can be generated using nichemodel, which takes two arguments: the number of species S, and the desired connectance C:

using BioEnergeticFoodWebs
nichemodel(10, 0.2)

10×10 Array{Int64,2}:
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  1  1  1  1  0  0  0  0  0
 0  1  1  1  1  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  1  1  1  1  1  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  1  1  1  1
 0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  0  0

Note that there are a number of keyword arguments (optional) that can be supplied: tolerance will give the allowed deviation from the desired connectance, and toltype will indicate whether the error is relative or absolute.