Multi-level diversity partitioning requires the groups at different hierarchical levels to be nested. i.e. two samples that belong to a common parent group cannot have different grandparent groups. The best example of nested hierarchy is taxonomy: e.g. two species that belong to the same genus cannot belong to different families. This function checks whether the groups specified in a hierarchy table have a nested structure.
Usage
is.nested(hierarchy)
Arguments
hierarchy
A matrix indicating the relation between samples (first column) and parent groups.