Two Methods of Correlation Coefficient on Compositional Data

Because compositional data have a series of complicated mathematical characteristics such as constant sum constraints, the usage of traditional statistical analysis methods in analyzing compositional data will usually cause difficulties. This paper focuses on the approach to measure the correlation of compositional data. Since the algorithm of correlation coefficient of common data is not adaptive to multi-variables data, and traditional canonical correlation analysis cannot be directly applied to compositional data, two kinds of approaches are presented which are based on logratio transformation and centered logratio transformation separately, combined with canonical correlation analysis, and succeeds in computing correlation coefficient of compositional data. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.