Statistical aspects of Mahalanobis distance based methodology
Tóm tắt
After a methodological introduction (section 1) it is indicated why Cherry et al. (1982) were not fair in suggesting that Mahalanobis distance is less reliable than other simple characteristics of morphological distance. The argument is that these authors used the type of Mahalanobis distance where the covariance matrix is based on the scores of the pair of samples to be compared. They should also have considered the much less unreliable type, where the same covariance matrix is used for all pairwise comparisons. This, at least, would not have displayed violations of the triangle inequality (section 2). The methodological discussions in the rest of the paper give a sense of the various uncertainties the statistician and the physical anthropologist are confronted with when trying to find solutions for outstanding anthropological problems. As a whole, the discussion is more philosophical than solution-oriented. The physical anthropologist and the statistician need to cut their way through the forest of uncertainties when a concrete problem is tackled. To do this it may be useful if various arguments have been listed, even if they are somewhat contradictory.
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