Multivariate data analysis: The French way

Abstract

This paper presents exploratory techniques for multivariate data, many of them well known to French statisticians and ecologists, but few well understood in North American culture. We present the general framework of duality diagrams which encompasses discriminant analysis, correspondence analysis and principal components, and we show how this framework can be generalized to the regression of graphs on covariates.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/193940307000000455 the IMS Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org