Abstract
In Population Genetics, two populations are distinguished from each other on the basis of the differences in the distributions of the alleles at the locus or loci under consideration. These differences are measured by a “genetic distance” between the two populations (not to be confused with genetic distance between two loci, which is based on recombination fractions) and they play a major role in inferences at the population level. Several measures of genetic distance have been proposed by different authors (Sanghvi 1953; Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards 1967; Jukes and Cantor 1969; Nei 1972; Kimura 1980; Reynoldset al 1983; reviews in Felsenstein 1991; Nei and Kumar 2000). Most of these measures are actually dissimilarity measures and not mathematically true distance measures (B-Rao and Majumdar 1999). Independently, and much before the geneticists, statisticians too were concerned with the idea of distinguishing between two (statistical) populations. In order to discriminate between two populations on the basis of one or more characters, divergence measures like “Mahalanobis’D 2 statistic” or “Mahalanobis’ generalized distance” (1936) and “Bhattacharyya’s distance” (1943, 1946), Kullback-Leibler’s divergence measure (1951) etc. have been proposed by statisticians. Mukherjee and Chattopadhyaya (1986) have mentioned measures based on distances, association between two attributes and discrimination function. There are similarities between the distance measures defined by applied scientists and by theoreticians. Felsenstein (1985) shows that three of the allele frequency-based genetic distance measures were anticipated by Bhattacharyya (1946). Nei and Takezaki (1994) have also studied the effectiveness of several genetic distance measures in the context of phylogenetic analysis, including Bhattacharyya’s distance measure.
References
Balakrishnan V and Sanghvi L D 1968 Distance between populations on the basis of attribute data;Biometrics 24 859–865
Bhattacharyya A 1943 On a measure of divergence between two statistical populations defined by their probability distributions;Bull. Cal. Math. Soc. 35 99–110
Bhattacharyya A 1946 On a measure of divergence between two multinomial populations;Sankhya 7 401–406
B-Rao C and Majumdar K C 1999 Reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships;J. Biosci. 24 121–137
Cavalli-Sforza L Land Conterio F 1960Atti. Assoc. Genet. Ital. 5 333–344 (in Italian)
Cavalli-Sforza L Land Edwards A W F 1967 Phylogenetic Analysis: Models and estimation procedures;Evolution 32 550–570
Cavalli-Sforza L L, Menozzi P and Piazza A 1994The history and geography of human genes (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Felsenstein J 1985 Phylogenies from gene frequencies: A statistical problem;Syst. Zool. 34 300–311
Felsenstein J 1991 PHYLIP (Phylogeny inference package) v.3-4. University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Fitch W and Margoliash M M 1967 Construction of phylogenetic trees;Science 155 279–284
Hillis D M, Moritz C and Mable B K (eds) 1996Molecular systematics (Sunderland: Sinauer Associates)
Jukes T H and Cantor A. R 1969 Evolution of protein molecules; inMammalian protein metabolism (ed.) H N Munro (NewYork: Academic Press) pp 21–132
Kimura M 1980 A simple method for estimating evolutionary rates of base substitutions through comparative studies of nucleotide sequences;J. Mol. Evol. 16 111–120
Kullback S 1997Information theory and statistics (New York: Dover Publications)
Kullback S and Leibler R A 1951 On Information and Sufficiency;Annals of Math. Stat. 22 76–86
Mahalanobis P C 1930 On the tests and measures of group divergences;J. Proc. Asiatic Soc. Bengal (New Series) 26 541–588
Mahalanobis P C 1936 On the generalised distance in ststistics;Proc. Natl. Inst. Sci. India 2 49–55
Mukherjee S P and Chattopadhyaya A K 1986 Measures of mobility and some associated inference problems;Demography India 15 269–280
Mukherjee S P, Chaudhuri A and Basu S K (eds) 1994Essays on probability and statistics (Festschrift in Honour of Professor Anil Kumar Bhattacharyya) (Calcutta: Department of Statistics, Presidency College)
Nei M 1972 Genetic distance between populations;Am. Nat. 106 283–292
Nei M and Kumar S 2000Molecular evolution and phylogenetics (Oxford: University Press) pp 266
Nei M and Takezaki N 1994 Estimation of genetic distances and phylogenetic trees from DNA analysis;Proc. 5th World Congr. Genet. Appl. Livestock Prod. 21 405–412
Reynolds J B, Weir B S and Cockerham A. C 1983 Estimation of the co-ancestory co-efficient; basis for a short term genetic distance;Genetics 105 767–779
Sanghvi L D 1953 Comparison of genetical and morphological methods for a study of biological differences;Am. J. Phys. Anthrop. 11 385–404
Sneath P H A and Sokal R R 1973Numerical taxonomy: The principles and practice of numerical classification (San Francisco: W Freeman)
Weir B S 1996Genetic data analysis 2: Methods for discrete population genetic data (2nd edition) (Sunderland: Sinauer Assoc).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chattopadhyay, A., Chattopadhyay, A.K. & B-Rao, C. Bhattacharyya’s distance measure as a precursor of genetic distance measures. J. Biosci. 29, 135–138 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02703410
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02703410