ABSTRACT

In this first chapter we indicate the particular orientation of this book. We then take a very broad historical perspective on data analysis. An illustrative example takes as its point of departure the closely related core algorithms used in principal components analysis and in correspondence analysis. From contrasting the results we show how and where the two approaches respond to different exigencies. Finally we present R software – which is handy as pseudo-code description as well as to be run – that was used in the illustrative example.