Objectives: We dealt with the traditional measures of diversity and their sample estimates. We also studied a way to compare sensitivity to changes of different measures of diversity.
Methods: We proposed a new estimator of measures of diversity. We compared our estimator with three established estimators in a simulation study. We introduced a function called sensitivity to changes of a measure of diversity H and we described its basic characteristics.
Results: The proposed estimator compares favorably to other well established estimators. The sensitivity to changes has a clear interpretation and is easy to compute.
Conclusions: The sensitivity of measure of diversity to changes could be used to compare behavior of different measures of diversity and to select one or few that are the most suitable for a given problem.