Diversity and Interdisciplinarity

div.exe for diversity measurement

The program div.exe accompanies:

Diversity and Interdisciplinarity:
How Can One Distinguish and Recombine Disparity, Variety, and Balance?

The dilemma which remained unsolved using Rao-Stirling diversity, namely of how variety and balance can be combined into "dual concept diversity" (Stirling, 1998, pp. 48f.) can be clarified by using Nijssen et al.'s (1998) argument that the Gini coefficient is a perfect indicator of balance. However, the Gini coefficient is not an indicator of variety; this latter term can be operationalized independently as relative variety. The three components of diversity--variety, balance, and disparity--can thus be clearly distinguished and independently operationalized as measures varying between zero and one. The new diversity indicator ranges with more resolving power in the empirical case.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09317

Input files are:

· Matrix.csv contains the data to be analyzed. Div.exe analyzes column vectors. The file needs to be in .csv (comma-separated variable) style and saved as MS-DOS. The file should not contain a header with variable labels, but only numerical information.

For example:

0,2,0,0,0

2,1,0,0,5

0,0,0,0,0

27,0,0,27

0,0,0,0,0

0,0,8,5,0

· Sim.csv contains a symmetrical similarity matrix (e.g., cosine values) in csv-format without a header.

For example:

1.0000,0.6270,0.3146,0.1280,0.1564

0.6270,1.0000,0.1319,0.0777,0.2190

0.3146,0.1319,1.0000,0.4214,0.1322

0.1280,0.0777,0.4214,1.0000,0.0865

0.1564,0.2190,0.1322,0.0865,1.0000

The output file diverse.dbf contains the following information for each vector:

· The first column contains the number of the column vector of matrix.csv analyzed;

· Rao-Stirling diversity;

· Diversity as defined in the article;

· Gini

· Simpson

· Shannon

· H_max

· Variety

· Total number of cases

· Number of cases with a value larger than one.

Amsterdam,

May 25, 2018