STATIS, a three-way method for data analysis. Application to environmental data

The present paper deals with the data exploration of three-way environmental data with the use of Structuration des Tableaux A Trois Indices de la Statistique (STATIS). The performance of the method is compared with Tucker3 and PARAFAC2, two more commonly used methods in chemometric N-way data analysis. The features of STATIS are demonstrated on real data sets. Due to its robust properties, lack of special requirements for data preprocessing and ability to deal with sets of two-way tables (matrices) that do not have the same dimension for columns or rows, STATIS appears as a very attractive three-way exploratory tool. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.