On the use of divergence statistics to make inferences about three habitats

Abstract

Several coefficients, called divergences, have been suggested in the statistical literature to reflect the fact that some probability distributions are ''closer together'' than others and consequently that it may be easier to distinguish between the distributions of one pair than between those of another. When comparing three biological populations, it is often interesting to measure how two of them ''move apart'' from the third. Deals with the statistical analysis of this problem by means of bivariate divergence statistics. Provides a unified study, depicting the behaviour and relative merits of traditional divergences, by using the (h,phi), divergence family of statistics introduced by Menendez et al.