[R] Dissimilarity

Mark Difford mark_difford at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Jun 20 21:49:00 CEST 2007


Hi Birgit,

Just to add to what Gavin has said.  There are two other very powerful
packages in R that handle this kind of thing: ade4 and vegan.  Have a
thorough look at both of them.  You should be looking at Principal
Coordinate Analysis (Classical Scaling) and Non Metric Multidimensional
Scaling (NMDS)---with, as Gavin has said, your species as rows.  At least
the first of these methods goes hand-in-glove with cluster analysis.

Given that you are based in Switzerland, and perhaps are Swiss, you probably
therefore read and speak French as a second/third language.  You may
therefore find the ade4 package more useful, since its authors are French,
and its principal authors, Prof. Daniel Chessel &c., have made publicly
available some exceptionally useful documentation on these methods on their
ade4 website.  These are mainly Prof. Chessel's lecture notes:

http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/R/enseignement.html

I hope that speeds you on your way.

Regards,
Mark.

PS: Apropos of the Legendre & Legendre text: It's well worth buying if you
work in this area; one of its authors, Pierre Legendre, now collaborates
with Jari Oksanen on some functions of the vegan package.


Gavin Simpson wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 16:13 +0200, Birgit Lemcke wrote:
>> Hello Stephen,
>> 
>> I am happy that you help me. Thanks a million.
>> 
>> It is a good feeling that you confirm my assumption that dsvdis is  
>> not able to deal with missing data, because it says me that I am not  
>> completely incapable.
>> Okay now I have the problem what to do.
>> I used this function cause there is an option to weight columns  
>> differently what I havent found in other functions.
>> 
>> But now I dont understand why I have to transpose the species as  
>> columns? As I read in the help manual of dsvdis this function  
>> calculates dissimilarities between rows.
>> I have to calculate the dissimilarities between species that are in  
>> rows by the use of morphological characters that are in columns.
> 
> If you really what to measure the associations between species then
> leave them as you had them as the rows. But make sure you are choosing a
> dissimilarity coefficient that works well for species associations.
> There is a whole section in Legendre and Legendre 1998 Numerical Ecology
> 2nd English Edition Elsevier which may help here.
> 
> HTH
> 
> G
> 
>> 
>> Am I completely wrong with my thoughts?
>> 
>> Birgit
>> 
>> Am 20.06.2007 um 15:52 schrieb Stephen B. Cox:
>> 
>> > Hi Birgit - looks like you have a few issues here.
>> >
>> > Birgit Lemcke <birgit.lemcke <at> systbot.uzh.ch> writes:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Hello you all!
>> >>
>> >> I am a completely new user of R and I have a problem to solve.
>> >> I am using Mac OS X on a PowerBook.
>> >>
>> >> I have a table that looks like this:
>> >>
>> >>             species X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 X6 X7 X8 X9 X10 X11 X12 X13 X14
>> >> X15 X16 X17 X18 X19 X20 X21
>> >> 1        Anth_cap1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1   0   0   0   0   0
>> >> 0   0   1   0   0   0   1
>> >> 2       Anth_crin1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1   0   1   0   0   0
>> >> 0   0   0   1   0   0   1
>> >> 3        Anth_eck1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1   0   0   0   0   0
>> >> 0   0   0   1   0   0   1
>> >> 4       Anth_gram1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1  NA  NA  NA  NA   0
>> >> 0   0   0   1   0   0   0
>> >> 5       Anth_insi1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1   0   0   0   1   0
>> >> 0   0   0   1   0   0   1
>> >>
>> >> All columns  are binary coded characters.
>> >> The Import was done by this
>> >>
>> >> Test<-read.table("TestRFemMalBivariat1.csv",header = TRUE, sep = ";")
>> >
>> > First - you need to transpose the matrix to have species as  
>> > columns.  You can do
>> > this with:
>> >
>> > d2 = data.frame(t(Test[,-1]))
>> > colnames(d2) = Test[,1]  #now use d2
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >> Now I try to perform a similarity analysis with the dsvdis function
>> >> of the labdsv package with the sorensen-Index.
>> >>
>> >> My first question is if all zeros in my table are seen as missing
>> >> values and if it islike that how can I change without turning zero
>> >> into other numbers?
>> >
>> > no - the zeros are valid observations.  the na's are missing data.
>> >
>> >
>> >>   DisTest<-dsvdis(Test, index = "sorensen")
>> >>
>> >> But I always get back this error message:
>> >>
>> >> Warnung in symbol.For("dsvdis") :'symbol.For' is not needed: please
>> >> remove it
>> >> Fehler in dsvdis(Test, index = "sorensen") :
>> >> 	NA/NaN/Inf in externem Funktionsaufruf (arg 1)
>> >> Zustzlich: Warning message:
>> >> NAs durch Umwandlung erzeugt
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Second - you have an issue with missing data.  It looks like dsvdis  
>> > does not
>> > like the NA's - so you must make a decision about what to do.   
>> > Delete that
>> > species, delete that site, or whatever...
>> >
>> > Finally - the warning over symbol.For is an issue with the labdsv  
>> > library itself
>> > - nothing you are doing wrong.  The results will still be valid -  
>> > but the use of
>> > symbol.For is something that will eventually need to be changed in  
>> > the labdsv
>> > library.
>> >
>> > hth,
>> >
>> > stephen
>> 
>> Birgit Lemcke
>> Institut fr Systematische Botanik
>> Zollikerstrasse 107
>> CH-8008 Zrich
>> Switzerland
>> Ph: +41 (0)44 634 8351
>> birgit.lemcke at systbot.uzh.ch
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
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>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> -- 
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>  Gavin Simpson                 [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522
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> ______________________________________________
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> 

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