Biplots in Practice is a comprehensive introduction to one of the most useful and versatile methods of multivariate data visualization: the biplot. The biplot extends the idea of a simple scatterplot of two variables to the case of many variables, with the objective of visualizing the maximum possible amount of information in the data. Research data are typically presented in the form of a rectangular table and the biplot takes its name from the fact that it visualizes the rows and the columns of this table in a common space. This book explains the specific interpretation of the biplot in many different areas of multivariate analysis, notably regression, generalized linear modelling, principal component analysis, log-ratio analysis, various forms of correspondence analysis and discriminant analysis. It includes applications in many different fields of the social and natural sciences, and provides three detailed case studies documenting how the biplot reveals structure in large complex data sets in genomics (where thousands of variables are commonly encountered), in social survey research (where many categorical variables are studied simultaneously) and ecological research (where relationships between two sets of variables are investigated).
About the Author
MICHAEL GREENACRE, Professor of Statistics at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and research collaborator with the BBVA Foundation, was educated initially in his country of birth, South Africa, and then obtained his doctorate in Paris at the Pierre et Marie Curie University (Paris VI) under professor Jean-Paul Benzécri, the creator of correspondence analysis as it is known today. He specialized in the visualization of large multivariate data sets, especially in the social and environmental sciences, and spent sabbatical research periods at Rothamsted Experimental Station (UK); Bell Laboratories, Rochester University and Stanford University (USA); the École des Mines (France); and the Norwegian Polar Environmental Centre in Tromsø (Norway). Besides co-editing three books on data visualization, he has written three books on correspondence analysis, the latest of which (Correspondence Analysis in Practice, 2nd edition) was published in Spanish (La práctica del análisis de correspondencias, 2008) by the BBVA Foundation.