13. Correspondence Analysis

Michal Benko and Michel Lejeune
18 November 2003

Correspondence analysis (CA) is a descriptive method which allows us to analyze and to XploRe the structure of contingency tables (or, by extension, non-negative tables where rows and columns are the entities of interest). It is similar to principal component analysis (PCA) in the sense that it attempts to obtain a representation of either the $ I$ row items or the $ J$ column items in a low dimensional space, while preserving at best total variation in the table.