A novel distance that reduces information loss in continuous
characters with few observations
Lo Valvo, G.A., Lehmann, O.E.R., and Balseiro, D.
Palaeontologia Electronica.


The file "DBIfunction.R" provides the function to compute DBI in R.

The easiest way to use the function is running the following line
in R (it could take a few seconds): 

	source("https://raw.github.com/GerALVo/Distance-Between-Intervals-DBI-/fa94e30d114c00e3523cb480cc839f9af5506e49/DBIfunction.R")

More information is available by accessing to the function's help by typing '?dbi'


Alternatively, the function can be loaded manually by following these steps:
	- Download "DBIfunction.R" in the working directory (the folder
	  where you are workingin)
	- Run the following line in your script or console:
			source("DBIfunction.R")
	- Now you should have a function called 'dbi' available to use
	

*** Important! ***

Note that DBI's function is set to work with one character at a time and with an
input where the minimum and maximum values are structured in two different columns
as a matrix or a data frame. To calculate the distance for two or more characters
coded as intervals we recommend nesting the characters' data frames into another
data frame or into a list and using the 'lapply()' function. This will return a
list of distance matrices to work with.
An example of this is given in the function's help (writing '?dbi').

To calculate the distance for two or more different types of characters, we recommend
working with the resulting distance matrices.