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Similarity measures for structured data: a general framework and some applications to vegetation data

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Numerical syntaxonomy

Part of the book series: Advances in vegetation science ((AIVS,volume 10))

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Abstract

Although there are many measures of similarity existing in the phytosociological literature, these almost all apply to data for which the describing attributes have only single values. In many cases, however, there can be a richer structure in the attribute values, either directly from the nature of the attributes or derived from relationships between the stands. In this paper, I first examine a range of possible sources of such structure in phytosociological data, and then propose a similarity measure sufficiently general to be applicable to all the variant types. Finally I present some examples of applying such measures to frequency data from tropical grasslands and to successional data from subtropical rain forest.

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Author notes

  1. M. B. Dale

    Present address: Division of Tropical Crops and Pastures, C.S.I.R.O., 306 Carmody Rd., St. Lucia, 4067, Qld., Australia

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  1. Dept. di Biologia, Università di Trieste, Via Valerio 30-32, Trieste, I-34100, Italy

    M. B. Dale

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L. Mucina M. B. Dale

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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Dale, M.B. (1989). Similarity measures for structured data: a general framework and some applications to vegetation data. In: Mucina, L., Dale, M.B. (eds) Numerical syntaxonomy. Advances in vegetation science, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2432-1_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2432-1_4

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  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7597-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-009-2432-1

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