This graduate-level text aims to introduce students of the natural sciences to the powerful technique of factor analysis and to provide them with the background necessary to be able to undertake analyses on their own. A thoroughly updated and expanded version of the authors' successful textbook on geological factor analysis, this book draws on examples from botany, zoology, ecology, and oceanography, as well as geology. Applied multivariate statistics has grown into a research area of almost unlimited potential in the natural sciences. The methods introduced in this book, such as classical principal components, principal component factor analysis, principal coordinate analysis, and correspondence analysis, can reduce masses of data to manageable and interpretable form. Q-mode and Q-R-mode methods are also presented. Special attention is given to methods of robust estimation and the identification of atypical and influential observations. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on application rather than theory.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.