Dear r-sig-ecology listers, I'm wondering if anyone has experience dealing with unbalanced designs and heterogeneity in dispersions in PERMANOVA. According to a study by Anderson and Walsh (2013), when both of these situations exist, "none of the tests (PERMANOVA, Mantel, or ANOSIM) behaved reliably for unbalanced designs in the face of heterogeneity." I imagine that some sort of resampling (bootstrapping?) might overcome the unequal sample sizes - If this is possible, then the issue of heterogeneity seems to be less of an issue for PERMANOVA. Is anyone familiar with an approach of this type, or perhaps another procedure? All the best, Marc Reference: Anderson, M. J., & Walsh, D. C. (2013). PERMANOVA, ANOSIM, and the Mantel test in the face of heterogeneous dispersions: What null hypothesis are you testing?. *Ecological Monographs*, *83*(4), 557-574.
PERMANOVA on unbalanced designs
1 message · Marc Taylor