Premium
AnthropMMD: An R package with a graphical user interface for the mean measure of divergence
Author(s) -
Santos Frédéric
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american journal of physical anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1096-8644
pISSN - 0002-9483
DOI - 10.1002/ajpa.23336
Subject(s) - divergence (linguistics) , measure (data warehouse) , graphical user interface , computer science , selection (genetic algorithm) , software , interface (matter) , r package , graphical model , software package , trait , data mining , artificial intelligence , programming language , philosophy , linguistics , bubble , maximum bubble pressure method , parallel computing
The mean measure of divergence is a dissimilarity measure between groups of individuals described by dichotomous variables. It is well suited to datasets with many missing values, and it is generally used to compute distance matrices and represent phenograms. Although often used in biological anthropology and archaeozoology, this method suffers from a lack of implementation in common statistical software. A package for the R statistical software, AnthropMMD, is presented here. Offering a dynamic graphical user interface, it is the first one dedicated to Smith's mean measure of divergence. The package also provides facilities for graphical representations and the crucial step of trait selection, so that the entire analysis can be performed through the graphical user interface. Its use is demonstrated using an artificial dataset, and the impact of trait selection is discussed. Finally, AnthropMMD is compared to three other free tools available for calculating the mean measure of divergence, and is proven to be consistent with them.