[R] How to calculate the index "the number of species combin

[(Ted Harding)]

On 07-Jul-07 22:18:42, Zhang Jian wrote:
> I want to analyze the co-occurrence of some species. In some
> papers, the authors said that the index"the number of species
> combinations (COMBO)" is a good index. I try to calculate the
> index by R language. But I can not get the right value. I think
> that I do not understand the concept of the index because my
> english is not good.
> 
> The concept:
> *The number of species combinations   *This index scans the
> columns of the presence-absence matrix and keeps track of the
> number of unique species combinations that are represented in
> different sites. For an assemblage of n species, there are 2n

[I think this should be 2^n]

> possible species combinations, including the combination of no
> species being present (Pielou and Pielou 1968). In most real
> matrices, the number of sites (= columns) is usually substantially
> less than 2n, which places an upper bound on the number of species
> combinations that can be found in both the observed and the
> simulated matrices.

English good or bad, I found the above description not easy to
follow! But, since I could see only one thing it could mean if
it was intended to gice a unique definition, I decided to test
on you data the hypothesis that Species Combinations means the
number of distinct columns in the data matrix.

I took your species-incidence data (not reproduced here) and
converted it to a matrix S of 0 and 1 with 19 columns and 17
rows (though the following would work just as well if it is a
dataframe):

S
   V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10 V11 V12 V13 V14 V15 V16 V17 V18 V19
1   0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
2   0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
3   0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
4   0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
5   1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0
6   0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
7   0  1  1  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
8   0  0  0  0  1  1  1  1  1   1   1   1   0   0   1   1   1   1   0
9   0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
10  1  1  1  1  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0
11  0  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  1   1   1   1   1   0   1   1   1   1   1
12  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
13  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
14  0  0  0  0  1  1  1  1  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
15  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
16  0  1  1  1  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
17  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0

There are 10 different columns in there, as can be found by

t(unique(t(S)))
   V1  V2  V3  V4  V5  V8  V9 V11 V13 V14
1   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
2   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
3   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0
4   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0
5   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1
6   0   0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0
7   0   1   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
8   0   0   0   0   1   1   1   1   0   0
9   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0   0   0
10  1   1   1   1   0   0   0   0   0   1
11  0   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   0
12  1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
13  0   0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
14  0   0   0   0   1   1   0   0   0   0
15  1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
16  0   1   1   1   0   0   0   0   0   0
17  0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0

Of the "missing" columns, it can be seen that V6 and V7 are the
same as V5, and V10, V12, V15, V16, V17, V18, V19 are the same
as V9. Hence the interpretation that "COMBO" means the number of
distinct columns is confirmed. If that is really the case, then
a very simple R function can be written for it:

COMBO<-function(S){ncol(t(unique(t(S))))}

COMBO(S)
[1] 10

> About the data, I calculated the index "COMBO" by other software.
> The value of the index is 10.
> Can you help me to calculate or give me some detalied explain about
> the concept of the index?

See above! I hope it helps.
Ted.

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Date: 08-Jul-07                                       Time: 00:46:08
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