A note on the occasional instability of detrending in correspondence analysis

✍ Scribed by Oksanen, Jari

• Book ID: 104621666
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 266 KB
• Volume: 74
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1573-5052
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00045610

✦ Synopsis

When the two first eigenvalues of correspondence analysis are close to each other, their order can be reversed due to random variation in the data. The first axis can actually be in any direction in the plane defined by the two axes. However, the configuration of the points in the plane can remain unchanged but their projections onto any line in the plane can be very variable. The ordering in the first axis is preserved in detrending. The second axis is detrended with respect to the first one and therefore very variable configurations result when the orientation of the first axis in the plane is changed. This can lead to a situation where the detrended solutions are very unstable under random variation and therefore they can be only casually interpretable.