Prolegomena

The methods listed for data analysis fall into two groups (factorial and classification), depending on their purpose and the nature of the variables considered (quantitative or qualitative).

• Various factorial methods can be deduced from principal component analysis or PCA (p quantitative variables): factorial correspondence analysis (FCA) (2 qualitative variables), multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) (p qualitative variables), discriminant factorial analysis (one qualitative variable and p quantitative variables), multidimensional positioning (distance table), canonical correlation analysis (p and q quantitative variables). This last method, much less widely used, is not described in this article. PCA is therefore given...