The statistical analysis of compositional data. (English) Zbl 0688.62004

Aitchison, J.

Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability. London - New York: Chapman and Hall. XV, 416 p.; Ł 28.00 (1986).

The monograph presents the current research and approaches to analysing compositional data. The motivation to the theory is achieved by giving practical problems in a wide variety of disciplines. The monograph essentially provides useful results for the problems presented rather than establishing detailed proofs of theories which sometimes may be irrelevant. However, the text provides sufficient depth of mathematical rigor in the analysis.
A pre-requisite knowledge on basic statistical analysis and multivariate analysis is necessary to understand the ideas developed in the text. Each chapter ends with a set of problems which the reader may use to practice the theory learnt. A special statistical package called CODA is also made available so that many of the methods could be worked out with ease computationally. The monograph is a useful addition to the statistical literature.

Reviewer: P.W.A.Dayananda

MSC:

62-02	Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to statistics
62-01	Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to statistics

Keywords:

statistical package CODA; compositional data; problems

Software:

R; CODA