Published in

Elsevier, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 8(53), p. 3117-3128

DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2008.09.010

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Two types of single-peaked data: Correspondence analysis as an alternative to principal component analysis

Journal article published in 2009 by Marike Polak ORCID, Willem J. Heiser, Mark de Rooij
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

It has been argued that principal component analysis (PCA) is not appropriate for analyzing data conforming to single-peaked response models, also referred to as unfolding models. An overview of these findings is given, which relates them to the distinction between two types of unfolding models; namely, models that are either a quadratic function of the person-to-item distances or an exponential function of these distances. This distinction is easy to recognize empirically because the inter-item correlation matrix for the two types of data typically shows different patterns. Furthermore, for both types of unfolding models, correspondence analysis (CA), which is a rival method for dimensionality reduction, outperforms PCA in terms of representation of both person and item locations, especially for the exponential unfolding model. Finally, it is shown that undoubled CA outperforms doubled CA for both types of unfolding models. It is argued that performing CA on the raw data matrix is an unconventional, but meaningful approach to scaling items and persons on an underlying unfolding scale. A real data example on personality assessment is given, which shows that for this type of data (undoubled) CA is to be preferred over PCA.