Easy manipulation of data and results-The PRIMER Workspace (*.pwk)
- • Work on multiple data-sets, graphics and output files simultaneously within a single interactive & intuitive graphical Windows environment.
- • Keep track of all your work easily using the tree-like navigation pane.
- • Input/output data from Excel, .csv, .txt or 3-column format.
- • View and change the colours, fonts, look & feel of your plots and graphics on-screen.
- • Copy/print/export results to .jpg, .emf, .tif, .gif, .png, .bmp or .rtf files.
- • Power and flexibility in specifying analyses.
- • Identify important subsets of samples or variables.
- • Define group structures for tests and displays.
- • Handle relatively large data sets (subject only to available Windows memory).
- • Merge or split data on specified criteria.
- • Unleash the time-saving power of in-built Wizards for matrix displays and core analyses.
Multivariate analysis is more than a stack of univariate parts.
Achieve a holistic view of your high-dimensional data by exploring and revealing its salient structures.
Ordination
- • Ordination techniques for visualising data, including principal components analysis (PCA), plus non-metric, metric or threshold-metric multi-dimensional scaling (nMDS, mMDS, tmMDS).
- • Visualise high-dimensional data in 2d or 3d. Customise text, colours and symbols. Add essential information with overlays, such as clusters, trajectories, bubbles, images, vectors, or minimum spanning trees.
- • Use bootstrapping to show confidence regions on MDS plots. Spin, expand, rotate, animate, save and share your insightful images.
Clustering
- • Perform hierarchical clustering into sample (or variable/species) groups, with single, complete, group-average or flexible-beta linkage options.
- • Create cophenetic distance matrices and plot dendrograms. Customise, rotate, collapse, zoom in, or print them out over multiple pages to capture all of the finer details.
- • Similarity profiles (SIMPROF) and associated permutation tests identify the coherence of groups of samples or species.
- • Divisive clustering methods can be unconstrained (UNCTREE), or constrained by environmental (or other) variables (LINKTREE), while krCLUSTER does a non-parametric version of k-means clustering.
Shade plots and Heat maps
- • Display actual values in 2d or 3d with grey-scale or colour spectra of choice.
- • Salient patterns are uncovered with ease.
- • Samples and variables can be sorted according to various criteria, including gradients, clustering constraints, or groupings.
- • Labels and symbols are easily modified and customised.
Non-parametric tests
- • Permutation-based hypothesis testing using analysis of similarities (ANOSIM), which tests for differences between groups of multivariate samples from different times, locations, experimental treatments, etc. PRIMER’s algorithms now support most three-way designs for these fully non-parametric tests.
- • Identify species primarily providing discrimination between two groups of samples (SIMPER).
- • Test for seriation and other Mantel-type tests for sequential data in time or space.
- • Relate matrices to one another or identify subsets of variables which together produce a ‘BEST’ Mantel-type match to a given resemblance matrix.
- • Permutation tests include variable-selection steps to ensure rigorous statistical inference.
Biodiversity analyses
- • Use taxonomic, functional and/or phylogenetic information to inform biodiversity assessments. Test against master lists using sub-sampling algorithms.
- • Calculate a multitude of classic and novel diversity indices or summary statistics of individual variables, with aggregation tools for analysing data at higher taxonomic levels.
- • Access a wide choice of flexible plotting functions for individual variables: line, histogram, scatter, bar, box, means, surface or Draftsman plots.
- • Ecology-specific tools are at your fingertips, such as dominance plots, geometric class plots, or abundance biomass curves (ABC).
