Population Affinity

Nonmetric Traits

Discrete traits scored as present/absent, used in biodistance studies, such as extra sutural bone or foramina variation.

Macromorphoscopic Traits

Nonmetric traits standardized and defined, scored on ordinal scales, used in forensic anthropology for ancestry or population affinity estimations.

Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA)

A statistical method to classify unknown individuals based on similarity to known groups, often used in estimating population affinity.

Mahalanobis Distance

A measure of the distance between an individual and a group centroid in multivariate space, used in DFA to assign individuals to reference populations.

Curse of Dimensionality

A consideration in DFA analysis where having too many variables relative to sample size can lead to overfitting, affecting classification accuracy.

Considerations of DFA

outliers and number of variables compared to sample size

PPS

probability of group membership based on relative distance to group centroid

TPS

how typical you are of that group