  Diversity is a central concept in many fields. Despite its importance, there
is no unified methodological framework to measure diversity and its three
components of variety, balance and disparity. Current approaches take into
account disparity of the types by considering their pairwise similarities.
Pairwise similarities between types do not adequately capture total disparity,
since they fail to take into account in which way pairs are similar. Hence,
pairwise similarities do not discriminate between similarity of types in terms
of the same feature and similarity of types in terms of different features.
This paper presents an alternative approach which is based similarities of
features between types over the whole set. The proposed measure of diversity
properly takes into account the aspects of variety, balance and disparity, and
without having to set an arbitrary weight for each aspect of diversity. Based
on this measure, the 'ABC decomposition' is introduced, which provides separate
measures for the variety, balance and disparity, allowing them to enter
analysis separately. The method is illustrated by analyzing the industrial
diversity from 1850 to present while taking into account the overlap in
occupations they employ. Finally, the framework is extended to take into
account disparity considering multiple features, providing a helpful tool in
analysis of high-dimensional data.
