[Mesquitelist] supermatrix building

[Wayne Maddison]

At 5:07 PM -0500 7.1.2010, Sam Donnelly wrote:
>Hello,
>
>What tools does Mesquite have for supermatrix building? I've used 
>the Matrix->Utilities->Concatenate Other Matrix tool, but was 
>wondering what else there might be.

You can fuse matrices on export to a file using File>Export>Fused 
Matrix Export 
(http://mesquiteproject.org/Mesquite_Folder/docs/mesquite/molecular/molecular.html#fusing)

>
>Other related, but more specific questions:
>
>Is there a way to see what characters that two matrices have in common?

The answer would always be "none" -- there is no sense of a character 
existing in more than one matrix at once.  This would be possible if 
we treated character names as full-blown identifiers (which we don't) 
or if characters in different matrices would share the same unique ID 
(which they don't in practice).  If we were to support such 
cross-matrix characters, we'd have to ensure their editing was 
synchronized (changes in one matrix immediately showed up in the 
other) and we'd have to design an interface to make it clear that 
these columns were linked.  It wouldn't make sense to let these 
characters differ ever; they would simply be two views into the same 
data.

Because of this we don't do any automatic column joining.  We could 
have a merge character feature that merges states of columns 
(regardless of whether the characters started off as the same) but we 
don't have such.

Wayne

>
>Is there a way to combine two matrices and join on a column? For 
>example if we had
>
>M1
>    c1 c2
>t1 0  1
>t2 1  1
>
>M2
>    c2 c3
>t1 1  1
>t2 1  0
>
>is there a way to concatenate them to get
>
>M1M2
>    c1 c2 c3
>t1  0  1  1
>t2  1  1  0
>
>I'm leaving aside the cases where c2 has different states for t1 and 
>t2 in the two matrices. But maybe there's some sort of conflict 
>resolution method for those cases?
>
>Thanks!
>
>Sam
>
>
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-- 
--------------------------------------------------------
Wayne Maddison
  Professor and Canada Research Chair
          Depts. of Zoology and Botany and
          Biodiversity Research Centre
  & Director
          Beaty Biodiversity Museum
  6270 University Boulevard
  University of British Columbia
  Vancouver, BC  V6T 1Z4   Canada

email: wmaddisn at interchange.ubc.ca   FAX: +1 604 822-2416

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