The problem of quantifying the overlap of Hutchinsonian niches has received much attention lately, in particular in quantitative ecology, from where it also originates. However, the niche concept has the potential to also be useful in many other application areas, as for example in economics. We are presenting a fully nonparametric, robust solution to this problem, along with exact shortcut formulas based on rank-statistics, and with a rather intuitive probabilistic interpretation. Furthermore, by deriving the asymptotic sampling distribution of the estimators, we are proposing the first asymptotically valid inference method, providing confidence intervals for the niche overlap. The theoretical considerations are supplemented by simulation studies and a real data example.

中文翻译：

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快速而稳健的方法来估计利基重叠和得出推断。

量化Hutchinsonian生态位重叠的问题最近引起了很多关注，特别是在定量生态学中，Hutchinsonian生态位也起源于此。但是，利基概念有潜力在许多其他应用领域中也很有用，例如在经济学中。我们将针对此问题提供一个完全非参数的，健壮的解决方案，以及基于秩统计的精确快捷方式公式以及相当直观的概率解释。此外，通过推导估计量的渐近采样分布，我们提出了第一种渐近有效推断方法，为利基重叠提供了置信区间。理论考虑由仿真研究和实际数据示例补充。