Diversity and its decomposition into variety, balance and disparity.

ABSTRACT: Diversity is a central concept in many fields. Despite its importance, there is no unified methodological framework to measure diversity and its three components of variety, balance and disparity. Current approaches take into account disparity of the types by considering their pairwise similarities. Pairwise similarities between types may not adequately capture total disparity, since they do not take into account in which way pairs are similar. Hence, pairwise similarities do not discriminate between similarities of types in terms of the same feature and similarities in which all pairs share different features. This paper presents an alternative approach which is based on the overlap of features over the whole set of types. This results in a measure of diversity that takes into account the

SUBMITTER: van Dam A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6689592 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature