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calculate "dispersion index" (betadisper, vegan)

Natalie & Zoltan,

I'd be more worried about the effect of outliers on the area of convex hulls. Here an _ad hoc_ definition of outlier: outlier a single point that has a huge effect on the area of an enclosing convex hull.

That said, two points are certainly on a line, and three points can be (almost) on a line. Four or more points can be on a line, but rarely they are.

In vegan, we have function betadisper() that is suggested to be used to measure the dispersion. It may be interesting to compare this to convex hulls. In vegan, summary() of ordihull() result gives the areas of convex hulls (see ?ordihull), and function ordiaretest() runs a permutation test on the areas of convex hulls.

Cheers, Jari Okanen
On 30/07/2015, at 08:52 AM, Zoltan Botta-Dukat wrote: