Abstract
The Jaccard index has long been used as an indicator of agreement or similarity between two individuals regarding the presence or absence of attributes, but there has been no formal development of such an index for more than two individuals. A more general index would be useful in various kinds of reliability studies involving presence-absence data. This paper develops a special case of a generalization of Gower's index as an index of reliability. The index involves weights to be assigned to attributes which are present on varying proportions of the individuals. Possible weighting systems are discussed. Also, a theoretical basis for the index is investigated using a binomial distribution composited with a continuous attribute appearance probability distribution. The index is calculated for molecular biological data on repeated RAPD analyses of the DNA of 23 strains of a fungus.
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