treestats (version 1.70.5)

blum: Blum index of (im)balance.

Description

The Blum index of imbalance (also known as the s-shape statistic) calculates the sum of \(log(N-1)\) over all internal nodes, where N represents the total number of extant tips connected to that node. An alternative implementation can be found in the Castor R package.

Usage

blum(phy, normalization = FALSE)

Value

Blum index of imbalance

Arguments

phy

phylogeny or ltable

normalization

because the Blum index sums over all nodes, the resulting statistic tends to be correlated with the number of extant tips. Normalization can be performed by dividing by the number of extant tips.

References

M. G. B. Blum and O. Francois (2006). Which random processes describe the Tree of Life? A large-scale study of phylogenetic tree imbalance. Systematic Biology. 55:685-691.

Examples

simulated_tree <- ape::rphylo(n = 10, birth = 1, death = 0)
  balanced_tree <- treestats::create_fully_balanced_tree(simulated_tree)
  unbalanced_tree <- treestats::create_fully_unbalanced_tree(simulated_tree)
  blum(balanced_tree)
  blum(unbalanced_tree) # should be higher