Building a better disease detective

Machine-learning methods have a few key advantages for ecology, a discipline that seeks to understand the complex and ever-shifting interplay between the billions of living beings jockeying for position on Earth. For instance, our algorithm can deal with our incomplete data sets. Biologists simply can´t learn everything about the 1.6 million species we´ve cataloged thus far, let alone the many millions we haven´t. But the algorithm considers the presence or absence of any particular piece of data as just another variable that can be used as a split point in its classification trees.