The Generalised Biplot: Software Potential

The whole area of ordination/multidimensional scaling is one of the most used statistical methodologies in the applied sciences. The very names of ordination, coming from ecology, and multidimensional scaling, from psychometrics, illustrate the range of applications. Included are well-known methods such as components analysis, biplots, non-metric scaling, correspondence analysis and multiple correspondence analysis. I shall be concerned here with unifying these seemingly diverse techniques and hence providing a solid basis for unified software. Generalisations to samples from several populations, several sets of variables or to so-called multiway techniques ( see Coppi and Belasco, 1989) will not be considered here.