diverse: an R Package to Analyze Diversity in Complex Systems

The package diverse provides an easy-to-use interface to calculate and visualize different aspects of diversity in complex systems. In recent years, an increasing number of research projects in social and interdisciplinary sciences, including fields like innovation studies, scientometrics, economics, and network science have emphasized the role of diversification and sophistication of socioeconomic systems. However, so far no dedicated package exists that covers the needs of these emerging fields and interdisciplinary teams. Most packages about diversity tend to be created according to the demands and terminology of particular areas of natural and biological sciences. The package diverse uses interdisciplinary concepts of diversity-like variety, disparity and balance-as well as ubiquity and revealed comparative advantages, that are relevant to many fields of science, but are in particular useful for interdisciplinary research on diversity in socioeconomic systems. The package diverse provides a toolkit for social scientists, interdisciplinary researcher, and beginners in ecology to (i) import data, (ii) calculate different data transformations and normalization like revealed comparative advantages, (iii) calculate different diversity measures, and (iv) connect diverse to other specialized R packages on similarity measures, data visualization techniques, and statistical significance tests. The comprehensiveness of the package, from matrix import and transformations options, over similarity and diversity measures, to data visualization methods, makes it a useful package to explore different dimensions of diversity in complex systems.