On 18/03/2014, at 15:23 PM, Eduard Szöcs wrote:

> Dear Alicia and Jari,
> 
> just a thought:
> Couldn't be capscale or betadisper be used for this?
> - To obtain the distances to the group centroid?
> 
> But than: How to convert this from distances to abundances?
> 
You can *almost* do this with capscale(), but not quite: for semimetric 
dissimilarities the results are not identical with capscale (they are identical 
with metric distances). The capscale() function also has fitted() and 
residuals() methods that both return dissimilarities. Now it also depends on 
what you mean with "residuals". The capscale() interpretation and the one I had 
on my mind is that 

1) adonis(fitted(adonis(y ~ model)) ~ model) should give distances where the 
fitted part of adonis(y ~model) and the residual variation part should be null, 
and

2) adonis(residuals(adonis(y ~model) ~ model) should give distances where fit 
would be null and residual similar as in the original adonis(y ~ model).

It would be possible to develop such functions, but not with the current 
adonis() output. You can approximate both of these with capscale() and its 
fitted() and residuals() methods, but not exactly. 

The ecodist package of Sarah Goslee takes a different approach, and could 
return something usable (but I do not know that package very well).

What really is needed depends on what you mean with "residuals". Should they be 
dissimilarities (which cannot be negative) or straightforward residuals (which 
have an average of zero and some of which are negative).

Cheers, jari Oksanen


 

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