# Dispatch on element types

In this lesson, we will see how we can dispatch on parametric types, in order to have a fine-grained control on what method is deployed against different types of data.

A common task in community ecology is to measure the β-diversity of two samples, i.e. the amount to which they resemble one another. We can do this based on an almost infinite type of data, but for now let us assume that we have measurements of species abundances at different locations.

We will assume that species abundances follow a log-Normal distribution, which is going to make some community ecologists deeply unhappy; there is no assumption that makes all ecologist happy.
using Distributions
number_of_sites = 120
species_richness = 41
abundance_distribution = Truncated(LogNormal(0.2, 3.0), 0.0, 100.0)
Y = round.(Int64, rand(abundance_distribution, number_of_sites, species_richness))
S = convert(Matrix{Bool}, (!iszero).(Y));

We are forcing S to be a Matrix{Bool} using convert only for the purpose of this example. Without the conversion, the type of S would be BitMatrix, which is a slightly different object. In real-life applications, this conversion is entirely superfluous.

We have two matrices: $\mathbf{Y}$ is a matrix with continuous values (e.g. biomass), whereas $\mathbf{S}$ has Boolean values (e.g. the species is present or absent).

These two data require different approaches to measure their β-diversity. In the case of boolean data, we can apply e.g. Whittaker’s β-diversity measure, which is

$$\beta = 2\frac{|S_1 \cup S_2|}{|S_1|+|S_2|}$$

or in other words, the total number of species divided by the average number of species, where $S_i$ is the set of species at location $i$.

What will a function to generate the pairwise β-diversity of our sites dispatch on? A first idea could be Y::Matrix{Bool}, which works. But we can do something a little trickier. We don’t really care that Y is a matrix. We care that it stores Bool-like values.

We can decompose this problem further – we care about pairwise comparison, so we want to work on vectors. So what we will do is write a dispatch that reflects this:

function β(S1::Vector{T}, S2::Vector{T}) where {T <: Bool}
γ = sum(S1 .| S2)
α = (1 / 2) * (sum(S1) + sum(S2))
return γ / α
end

β (generic function with 1 method)

We do not really use the ∪ instruction for sets here, even though we could – it’s simply that using Boolean operators achieves the same result, and is likely much faster.

In the case of quantitative values, rather than using the Whittaker formula as above, we can measure one minus the Tanimoto distance:

function β(S1::Vector{T}, S2::Vector{T}) where {T <: Real}
num = abs.(S1 .- S2)
den = [max(S1[i], S2[i]) for i in eachindex(S1)]
return 1-num/den
end

β (generic function with 2 methods)

This is actually more likely to make community ecologists angry, because this looks suspiciously like Jaccard’s similarity. It’s true.
function β(Y::Matrix{T}) where {T <: Bool}
end

β (generic function with 3 methods)