We find that target-group background improves average performance for all the modeling methods we consider, with the choice of background data having as large an effect on predictive performance as the choice of modeling method.
Can we reproduce the AUC-improvement result behind this sentence on Phillips' own data (the Elith et al. 2006 NCEAS dataset)? Using per-species MaxEnt, we can compare random background against target-group background and measure AUC on the independent presence-absence evaluation sites, testing whether the target-group gain reported in Phillips Table 2 reproduces in sign and magnitude with an independent open-source MaxEnt engine.
Paper annotation: We find that target-group background improves average performance for all the modeling methods we consider, with the choice of background data having as large an effect on predictive performance as the choice of modeling method.