Premium
Overlap Summary Indices and the Detection of Community Structure
Author(s) -
Thomson James D.,
Rusterholz Kurt A.
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.144
H-Index - 294
eISSN - 1939-9170
pISSN - 0012-9658
DOI - 10.2307/1938941
Subject(s) - pairwise comparison , context (archaeology) , community structure , ecology , competition (biology) , index (typography) , statistics , resource (disambiguation) , econometrics , mathematics , computer science , geography , biology , computer network , archaeology , world wide web
Overlaps in resource use have been used to summarize community structure. It is ofen desirable to compare the amount of intensity of overlaps (or other pairwise measures such as competition coefficients) in different communities, especially in the context of comparing actual communities to "neutral model" simulations. We show that the most commonly used index for such comparisons, the mean pairwise overlap, is often unsuitable, and suggest alternate approaches.