Martin, Thank you so much for your quick reply.
I actually did the clustering trying both the R base package and pvclust. 
I am having trouble interpreting some results from the Ranked abundance distribution (see below).
Thank you again, regards!!
S

On Dec 17, 2013, at 12:47 PM, Martin Weiser <weiser2@natur.cuni.cz> wrote:

> Sol Noetinger píše v Út 17. 12. 2013 v 12:01 -0300:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I am trying to apply different statistics methods in a field that traditionally is not very keen to it and in consequence I am trying to learn all that I can. 
>> To the point, I am studying a palynological succession from the Devonian. I have counts of palynomorphs (around 250) from a set of 17 samples. I use the relative abundance to standardise the counting since there are some samples that did have not enough specimens.
>> I have tested cluster analysis with different packages, resulting in two clear groups. I tested the abundance distribution on both groups to see which model fits better.
>> 
>> This is the summary:
>> 
>> Cluster I
>> RAD models, family poisson 
>> No. of species 24, total abundance 100
>> 
>>           par1     par2    par3   Deviance AIC     BIC    
>> Null                               55.2189      Inf     Inf
>> Preemption    0.1                  85.4721      Inf     Inf
>> Lognormal   0.20534  1.6811         8.0522      Inf     Inf
>> Zipf        0.42497 -1.4264         1.4461      Inf     Inf
>> Mandelbrot  1.4285  -1.8885      1  3.4265      Inf     Inf
>> 
>> Cluster II
>> RAD models, family poisson 
>> No. of species 35, total abundance 100
>> 
>>           par1     par2    par3   Deviance AIC     BIC    
>> Null                               25.7004      Inf     Inf
>> Preemption    0.1                  27.8760      Inf     Inf
>> Lognormal   0.21756  1.3473         4.7797      Inf     Inf
>> Zipf        0.27724 -1.0959         4.9038      Inf     Inf
>> Mandelbrot  0.64175 -1.3825      1  4.9181      Inf     Inf
>> 
>> I read from the manual that to see which models fits better you use the AIC values. 
>> What is the meaning of getting "infinite"?
>> Can I use the Deviance value to compare the models?
>> And in case I can use the deviance, since there are very close values, should I run a test to see if the differences are significant? in that case, which  one?.
>> 
>> I apologise if my questions are too basic, or if I should refer to a different kind of forum or thread. 
>> I hope you can help me, thank you for your time,
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Sol
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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> 
> Hi Sol,
> 
> I am not sure whether I got it right:
> Your data are exotic, but besides of this, you just need simple
> clustering of 17 samples with cca. 250 "species".
> 
> If this is a case, what about to use e.g. vegdist from the vegan package
> to get inter-sample distances and then run hclust?
> Then the problem reduces to finding appropriate distance measure - if
> you have no better idea, one may start with something like Bray-Curtis 
> 
> But maybe I am wrong and somebody will correct me.
> HTH,
> Martin
> 
> 
> 


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