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Abstract The impact of observational errors on the dendrograms produced by the complete linkage and single linkage hierarchical grouping techniques was investigated. Data corresponding to basal taxonomies were perturbed by adding error to the ranks of the inter-specimen pair proximities. The goodness of fit of the dendrograms obtained from the perturbed data and that corresponding to the basal taxonomies were measured by means of the Goodman-Kruskal gamma coefficient. Empirical sampling distributions of the gamma coefficients indicated that the single linkage grouping technique was more sensitive to the type of data errors employed than the complete linkage technique.
Frank B. Baker (Sat,) studied this question.