Permutational analysis of variance (original) (raw)

Permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA), is a non-parametric multivariate statistical permutation test. PERMANOVA is used to compare groups of objects and test the null hypothesis that the centroids and dispersion of the groups as defined by measure space are equivalent for all groups. A rejection of the null hypothesis means that either the centroid and/or the spread of the objects is different between the groups. Hence the test is based on the prior calculation of the distance between any two objects included in the experiment.PERMANOVA shares some resemblance to ANOVA where they both measure the sum-of-squares within and between group and make use of F test to compare within-group to between-group variance. However, while ANOVA bases the significance of the result on