R: Estimate the Shannon-Wiener index

estShannonf {MCPAN} | R Documentation

## Estimate the Shannon-Wiener index

### Description

Calculate estimates of the Shannon-Wiener index after pooling over several samples, grouped by a factor variable.

### Usage

    estShannonf(X, f)

### Arguments

`X` | a data.frame of dimension n times p with integer entries, where n is the number of samples and p is the number of species
`f` | a factor variable of length n, grouping the observations in `X`

### Details

The function splits `X` according to the levels of the grouping variable `f`, builds the sum over each column and calculates the Shannon index ove the resulting counts.

### Value

A list, containing the elements:

`estimae` | a named numeric vector, the groupwise Shannon indices with bias correction according to Fritsch and Hsu (1999)
`estraw` | a named numeric vector, the groupwise Shannon indices, without bias correction
`varest` | a named numeric vector, the groupwise variance estimates of the Shannon indices
`table` | a matrix, giving the summarized counts of the groups in the rows

### References

Fritsch, KS, and Hsu, JC (1999): Multiple Comparison of Entropies with Application to Dinosaur Biodiversity. Biometrics 55, 1300-1305.

### Examples

    data(HCD)
    HCD

    # Groupwise point estimates:

    est<-estShannonf(X=HCD[,-1], f=HCD[,1])

    est

[Package MCPAN version 1.1-21 Index]