Bhattacharyya's distance measure as a precursor of genetic distance measures

摘要

Bhattacharyya (1946) cites the influence of Mahalanobis (1930) while defining his measure of diversity between two populations. His concept of viewing frequency distributions as points in geometric space has found wide applications in diverse fields, including genetics. Evolutionary geneticists routinely use various distance measures, like Nei's standard genetic distance, Cavalli-Sforza's arc or chord distance and Balakrishnan and Sanghvi's distance, all of which were explicitly or implicitly contained within Bhattacharyya's work. However, Bhattacharyya's work, which preceded the others by two to five decades, is rarely cited in any of the most prominent and visible works in phylogenetic analysis. It is only appropriate that the record be set right by researchers in the field.