Multidimensionalscaling(MDS)isatechniquefortheanalysisofsimilarity or dissimilarity data on a set of objects. Such data may be intercorrelations of test items, ratings of similarity on political candidates, or trade indices forasetofcountries.MDSattemptstomodelsuchdataasdistancesamong pointsinageometricspace.Themainreasonfordoingthisisthatonewants a graphical display of the structure of the data, one that is much easier to understand than an array of numbers and, moreover, one that displays the essential information in the data, smoothing out noise. There are numerous varieties of MDS. Some...

Multidimensional Similarity Structure Analysis comprises a class of models that represent similarity among entities (for example, variables, items, objects, persons, etc.) in multidimensional space to permit one to grasp more easily the interrelations and patterns present in the data. The book is oriented to both researchers who have little or no previous exposure to data scaling and have no more than a high school background in mathematics and to investigators who would like to extend their analyses in the direction of hypothesis and theory testing or to more intimately...