Visualizations of Asymmetric Multidimensional Scaling

Abstract

Distances or dissimilarities among units are assumed to be symmetric in most cases of multidimensional scaling(MDS); consequently, it is not an easy task to deal with asymmetric distances. Current asymmetric MDS still face difficulties in the interpretation of results. This study proposes a simpler asymmetric MDS that utilizes the order statistic of an asymmetric matrix. The proposed Web method demonstrates that some influences among objects are visualized by direction, size and shape of arrow to ease the interpretability of users.