Affiliation: | a Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Gestionali e Sociali, Università degli Studi del Molise, Via De Sanctis, 86100 Campobasso, Italy b Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistiche Applicate, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, P.le A. Moro, 5-00185, Rome, Italy |
Abstract: | Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a well-known technique, the aim of which is to synthesize huge amounts of numerical data by means of a low number of unobserved variables, called components. In this paper, an extension of PCA to deal with interval valued data is proposed. The method, called Midpoint Radius Principal Component Analysis (MR-PCA), recovers the underlying structure of interval valued data by using both the midpoints (or centers) and the radii (a measure of the interval width) information. In order to analyze how MR-PCA works, the results of a simulation study and two applications on chemical data are proposed. |