ABSTRACT
Some data sets fit much more naturally into a multidimensional structure than into related lists or 1-dimensional data sets. The benefit of organizing appropriate data into a multidimensional structure is that, by taking advantage of relationships between the elements, analysts can apply an additional suite of techniques. These techniques will sometimes reveal features in the multidimensional data set that wouldn’t otherwise have been apparent. Multidimensional data sets should not be intimidating – in fact, people use several multidimensional data sets in their everyday lives. For example, many tables fall into this category of structure, such as a table of weather data in which the horizontal headings are the day of the week, the vertical headings are the time of day, and the table elements are temperature or the chance of precipitation.
