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adonis

4 messages · Alan Haynes, Jari Oksanen

2 days later
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Alan,

A few comments on your procedure. You have two non-standard things in your message: you try to do something that looks like post hoc tests, and you use non-standard contrasts. There is nothing post hoc in your post hoc tests. What you do is that you break your factor variable into separate contrasts. If do so, you should carefully read the adonis output which says

"Terms added sequentially (first to last)"

If your contrasts are correlated, like they are in the example you gave, the results for individual terms will depend on the order of terms. Usually people associate post hoc tests with multiple testing problem, but there is nothing about that in the example you gave. It is just simple testing of individual contrasts.

Second point is that you used non-standard contrasts. The species coefficients will depend on contrasts and therefore they change. There are easier way of doing the same. For instance, you seem to want to have sum contrasts, but with different baseline level. Check functions like model.matrix, contrasts, relevel, and as.data.frame. However, the magnitude of coefficient also depends on specific contrasts that you use.

Cheers, Jari Oksanen
On 24/05/2013, at 16:48 PM, Alan Haynes wrote:

            

  
    
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Alan,

You should remember that adonis() models are sequential and the order of terms matters. Moreover, redundant terms will be ignored. This also applies to terms which are made of single contrasts. In balanced design with non-redundant contrasts you can easily get the results (statistics, significances) for single terms, but your description sounds like this is not the case.

cheers, Jari Oksanen
On 27/05/2013, at 10:21 AM, Alan Haynes wrote: