Choosing noise dose bin widths when modeling community response to noise

Abstract

While there are many studies on how communities respond to noise, there are few that explicitly define how the noise dose, used to fit community response models, are binned. When modeling the dose response relationship between noise and community annoyance, the choice of the noise bin width can drastically affect the community response or tolerance models fit to the data. To explore the optimal noise bin width, we fit various dose response models to bin widths between 1 and 10 dB and data that had been divided into bins of varying widths but an equal number of points in each bin. Additionally, we fit the models using a weighted regression procedure that weights each bin by its number of points, and find that this approach mitigates the modeling errors implicit to the (often arbitrary) noise bin width decision.