Cajo J. F. ter Braak is WRF researcher and personal professor at Biometris, Wageningen University & Research and the inventor of Canonical Correspondence Analysis, resulting from a Eureka moment in 1987. He is the senior author of the software package Canoco, now in version 5.10, for visualization and testing of multivariate data (by constrained and unconstrained correspondence analysis, principal component analysis and NMDS).  A second Eureka moment led to adaptive MCMC sampler called Differential Evolution Markov Chain (DE-MC aka DREAM), which is popular in hydrology and astronomy; for example, DE-MC has been used in the analysis of the first gravitational waves ever detected.

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TITLE OF PRESENTATION

L-shaped data: from GLM to fourth corner correlation and double constrained correspondence analysis

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ABSTRACT

L-shaped data consists of a non-negative central matrix with associated constraining (predictor)  matrices for rows and columns.  Formally, it is (weighted) bigraph with node predictors. Examples are preference data of consumers for products with features of both consumers and products as predictors, supervisory boards of firms with features of supervisors and firms as predictors for the membership, and, in ecology, abundance data of species and environmental variables with traits and environmental variables as predictors. We will discuss the statistical issues of analysing such data starting with GLM and GLMM models. With a single trait and environmental variable, the Rao score  test on the interaction in a loglinear model is shown to reduce to the squared fourth-corner correlation introduced by Legendre et al. (1997). With multiple traits and environmental variables, it leads to double constrained correspondence analysis (dc-CA), which encompasses both simple and multiple correspondence analysis and canonical correspondence analysis. Some ecological applications will be discussed, in which dc-CA based forward selection of traits and environmental variables is used to select the most important traits and environmental variables that structure the central abundance table. The method is available in R and in Canoco 5.10.

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Peter Filzmoser is full professor at the statistics department of the Vienna
University of Technology. His main research interests include robust statistics, methods for compositional data analysis, statistical computing, and R, and many more. He is the author of two books: Statistical Data Analysis Explained. Applied Environmental statistics with R and Introduction to Multivariate Statistical Analysis in Chemometrics. Currently Peter is head of the Research Unit in Computational Statistics, Institute of Statistics and Mathematical Methods in Economics, Vienna University of Technology.

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FOCUS OF PRESENTATION

Peter's talk will focus on compositional data (CoDa) analysis with emphasis on the robust methods that they developed over the last years - also for high-dimensional data. Since correspondence analysis is in focus at the conference, their CoDa approaches to compositional tables will also receive attention.

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Angela Montanari is full professor of Statistics and Head of the Department of Statistical Sciences University of Bologna since 2015. She is President elect of the International federation of Classification Societies 2018-2019. Her research interests include Exploratory Projection Pursuit, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Transvariation, Supervised and Unsupervised Classification, Independent Component Analysis and Independent Factor Analysis, Latent Variate Models as well as Recursive Partitioning Methods.

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FOCUS OF PRESENTATION

Angela's talk will focus on Matrix Sketching as a tool for big data multivariate analysis.

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Frédéric Lebaron is professor of sociology at Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (France) / university Paris-Saclay, member of the research group Institutions et dynamiques historiques de l'économie et de la société. He specializes in economic sociology and social inequality, and the use of Geometric Data Analysis for the study of social spaces and fields.
He recently co-authored La méthodologie de Pierre Bourdieu en action, Bourdieu and Data Analysis, Lectures de Pierre Bourdieu and numerous articles and book chapters, including Geometry of the field, in the recent Oxford Bourdieu Handbook.
 

FOCUS OF HIS TALK
 "Social space and the international comparison of class structures".

Riaan de Jongh is the Director of the Centre for Business Mathematics and Informatics® (BMI) at North-West University (NWU). In the first half of his professional career he worked in industry as consultant, and then, in the second half, he played a leading role in the establishment of the Centre for BMI at the NWU. The industry directed nature of the BMI training and research programmes was recognised in 2005 by the international software giant SAS, when the Centre for BMI received the Academic Intelligence Award at the SAS Global Forum in Lisbon. Riaan also received awards for the best published research in a particular year from the Operational Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA), the South African Statistical Association (SASA), the Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA) and Risk.net. He also received a Thought Leader Award from SASA, a National Recognition award from ORSSA and was a finalist for an NSTF award. While at Deloittes Consulting, he worked with the team that received the coveted Franz Edelman Prize for Achievements in Management Science from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences  (INFORMS). A personal highlight was an invitation to partake in a workshop on Statistics and Mathematics in Quantitative Risk Management at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics, situated in the German Black Forest.

John Gower has attended every CARME conference since 1991. At the mature age of 88 John will not be travelling from the UK to South Africa, but reflect on Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods via Skype. After spending his first employment life at Rothamsted Experimental Station, he retired as head of the Biostatistics Division. Thereafter John paid a two year visit to Leiden University before joining The Open University in Milton-Keynes in a research capacity. John is the author of numerous scientific papers published over a period spanning almost seven decades and also the author of three books: Biplots, Procrustes Problems and Understanding biplots. Since 2013 John is emeritus professor of The Open University, residing in Nailsworth in the Cotswolds. He is a firm believer and practitioner of thinking in terms of geometry before calculating the algebra.