Category: Introduction to Multivariate Analysis

In regression models there is a clear separation between the regressed variable and the regressors (explanatory variables): This does not necessarily mean that there is a causal relationship, but it is enough to classify regression models as dependence models. Regression models arise naturally for dealing with metric variables, but we may use binary variables to…

Multivariate methods can be classified along different features: In the following sections we outline some multivariate methods, suggesting a classification along the above dimensions. We do not aim at being comprehensive; the idea is getting to appreciate the richness of this field of statistics, as well as the classification above in concrete terms.

Outliers and wrong data are quite common in data analysis. If data are collected automatically, and they are engineering measurements, this may not be a tough issue; however, when people are involved, either because we are collecting data using questionnaires, or because we are investigating a social system, things may turn out to be a…

The core topics in statistical inference are point and interval parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, and analysis of variance. Some of the related procedures are conceptually easy to adapt to a multivariate case. For instance, maximum likelihood estimation is not quite different, even though it is going to prove computationally more challenging, thus requiring numerical optimization…

In standard inferential statistics one typically assumes that data consist of real or integer numbers. However, data may be qualitative as well, and the more dimensions we have, the more likely the joint presence of quantitative and qualitative variables will be. In some cases, dealing with qualitative variables is not that difficult. For instance, if…

Visualization is not the only reason why we need data reduction methods. Quite often, multivariate data stem from the administration of a questionnaire to a sample of respondents; each question corresponds to a single variable, and a set of answers by a single respondent is a multivariate observation. It is customary to ask respondents many…

The first and most obvious difficulty we face with multivariate data is visualization. If we want to explore the association between variables, one possibility is to draw scatterplots for each pair of them; for instance, if we have 4 variables, we may draw a matrix of scatterplots, like the one illustrated in Fig. 15.1. The matrix…

In the next sections we briefly outline the main complication factors that arise when dealing with multidimensional data. Some of them are to be expected, but some are a bit surprising. Getting aware of these difficulties provides the motivation for studying the wide array of sometimes quite complex methods that have been developed. Fig. 15.1 A matrix…

Multivariate analysis is the more-or-less natural extension of elementary inferential statistics to the case of multidimensional data. The first difficulty we encounter is the representation of data. How can we visualize data in multiple dimensions, on the basis of our limited ability to plot bidimensional and tridimensional diagrams? In Section 15.1 we show that this is just…