Actually, my interest is in the partition of functional traits space
sampled in plants communities. I’m especially interested by testing niche
theory through different constraints on the variance of components.
I know the number of species in each community, so I could possibly fix a
maximum number of components. But I don’t quite well understand how the
model could fit “empty” or null components, instead of dividing the space
with the smallest parts possible (a behaviour I observed with the EM
algorithm)…