Hello, I am a new R user and trying to learn how to implement the mahalanobis function to measure the distance between to 2 population centroids. I have used STATISTICA to calculate these differences, but was hoping to learn to do the analysis in R. I have implemented the code as below, but my results are very different from that of STATISTICA, and I believe I may not have interpreted the help correctly and may have implemented the code incorrectly.
Though I am not certain, I believe that my error may be in calculating the common covariance matrix (the third argument supplied to the mahalanobis funtion). Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! RL CODE fit<-lda(pop~v1 + v2 + v3 +...+vn, data=my.data) x1<-subset(my.data, pop==1) x2<-subset(my.data, pop==2) #Save Covariance Matices for each group cov1<-cov(x1) cov2<-cov(x2) #Determine number of rows in each matrix n1<-nrow(x1); n2<-nrow(x2); n.rows<-c(n1,n2) #store mean vectors from lda object mu1<-fit$means[1,] mu2<-fit$means[2,] #Calculate the common Covariance Matrix S<-(((n.rows[1]-1)*cov1)+((n.rows[2]-1)*cov2)/ (sum(n.rows[1:2])-1)) #Calculate the common Covariance Matrix mahalanobis(mu1, mu2, S) [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.