GUE: God's unbiased estimator

In mikeroswell/MeanRarity: Hill Diversity Estimation and Visualization

God's unbiased estimator

Description

The mean rarity perspective suggests a novel approach to estimating true diversity from a sample, using the fact that the sample mean is an unbiased estimate of the population mean. Although how to estimate a species’ rarity from sample data remains unsolved, we test the promise of this idea using what we call God’s estimator: All-knowing, God can plug in the true population parameters for each species. Nevertheless, maybe for fun, God chooses to compute the sample mean, weighting species’ true rarities by their sampled frequency.

Usage

GUE(freqs, true_p, l, q = NULL)

Arguments

freqs	Non-negative numeric vector of observed species frequencies
true_p	Non-negative numeric vector of true, population-level species frequencies
l	Scaling exponent for the mean, can be any real number.
q	Scalar, traditional Hill number scaling exponent, q = 1-l where l is the scaling parameter for the generalized mean. Can be any real number.

Examples

GUE(freqs =  1:10/sum(1:10), true_p =  1:10/sum(1:10), l = 1) # true richness 10
GUE(freqs =  rep(1:5,2)/sum(1:10), true_p =  1:10/sum(1:10), l = 1) # true richness 10

mikeroswell/MeanRarity documentation built on May 5, 2024, 4:50 p.m.