This book contains a collection of commissioned, edited chapters on the general theme of descriptive multivariate analysis, provided by a series of contributors to a symposium held at the University of Exeter. Areas covered include cluster analysis, principal components, canonical correlations and varieties, nonlinear methods, biplots, Procrustes analysis, correspondence analysis, graphical models, and analysis of functional data. The emphasis throughout is on methodology, but computational aspects and applications are also highlighted where appropriate. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and the book as a whole provides a state of the art summary of the descriptive multivariate area. The academic level lies between that of an introduction to the subject and an advanced monograph, and the book contains numerous topics not covered elsewhere in existing texts.
