Multivariate Statistics: A Practical Approach

During the last twenty years multivariate statistical methods have become increasingly popular among scientists in various fields. The theory had already made great progress in previous decades and routine applications of multivariate methods followed with the advent of fast computers. Nowadays statistical software packages perform in seconds what used to take weeks of tedious calculations. Although this is certainly a welcome development, we find, on the other hand, that many users of statistical packages are not too sure of what they are doing, and this is especially true for multivariate statistical methods. Many researchers have heard about such techniques and feel intuitively that multivariate methods could be useful for their own work, but they haven't mastered the usual mathematical prerequisites. This book tries to fill the gap by explaining - in words and graphs - some basic concepts and selected methods of multivariate statistical analysis. Why another book? Are the existing books on applied multivariate statistics all obsolete? No, some of them are up to date and, indeed, quite good.