How do I implement a non-default dissimilarity metric with vegan function metaMDS()?

Question

I have constructed a distance matrix from phylogenetic data using the Claddis function MorphDistMatrix() with the distance metric "MORD" (Maximum Observable Rescaled Distance). I now want to use this dissimilarity matrix to run an NMDS using the vegan function metaMDS(). However, although metaMDS has many distance metrics to choose from, "MORD" is not one of them. How do I enable metaMDS() to have this metric as an option?

Edit: here is some example code:

nexus.data<-ReadMorphNexus("example.nex")

Reading in Nexus file

dist<- MorphDistMatrix(nexus.data, distance = "MORD")

Claddis command for creating distance matrix. Instead of using the Gower dissimilarity (distance = "GC"), I would like to use Maximum Observable Rescaled Distance (distance = "MORD"), which is a modified form of Gower for use with ordered characters (Lloyd 2016). So far so good.

nmds<-metaMDS(dist$DistanceMatrix, k=2, trymax=1000, distance = "GC")

Here is where I run into trouble: as I understand it, the distance used for the metaMDS command should be the same as was used to construct the distance matrix, but MORD is not an option for "distance" in metaMDS. If I were to construct the distance matrix under Gower dissimilarity it wouldn't be a problem, as that is also available in metaMDS

Lloyd, G. T., 2016. Estimating morphological diversity and tempo with discrete character-taxon matrices: implementation, challenges, progress, and future directions. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 118, 131-151.

Jari Oksanen Jari Oksanen · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-04T16:20:04

metaMDS has argument distfun to select other dissimilarity functions than vegdist. Such a function should accept argument method to select the dissimilarity measure used. Further, it should return a regular dissimilarity object that inherits from standard R dist function. I do not know about this Claddis package: does it return regular dissimilarities or something peculiar? Your example hints that it returns something that is not a regular R object, but something peculiar. Alternatively, you can use pre-calculated dissimilarities as input in metaMDS. Again these should be regular dissimilarities like in any decent R implementation. So you need to check the following with your dissimilarities:

inherits(dist, "dist") # your dist result: should be TRUE
inherits(dist$DistanceMatrix, "dist") # alternatively this should be TRUE
## if the latter was TRUE, you can extract that with
d <- dist$DistanceMatrix
## if d is not a "dist" object, you can see if it can be turned into one
d <- as.dist(dist$DistanceMatrix)
inherits(d, "dist") # TRUE: OK, FALSE: no hope
## if it was OK, you just do
metaMDS(d)

How do I implement a non-default dissimilarity metric with vegan function metaMDS()?

1 Answers