A comparison study and discussion of the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System

The Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS) is a diagnostic tool for selecting the appropriate variables and quantifying the degree of abnormality in the group that needs to be diagnosed. MTS is said to be 'data analytic' rather than 'probability distribution based'. This statement has brought out some controversy in the statistics community. Despite the simplicity of MTS, it is considered ad hoc owing to the lack of statistical and probability theory. In this paper, we attempt to incorporate statistical thinking into the ad hoc parts of MTS by comparing with other multivariate statistical methods.