What is the Cluster Analysis? The Cluster Analysis is an explorative analysis that tries to identify structures within the data.  Cluster analysis is also called segmentation analysis or taxonomy analysis.  More specifically, it tries to identify homogenous groups of cases, i.e., observations, participants, respondents.  Cluster analysis is used to identify groups of cases if the grouping is not previously known.  Because it is explorative it do…

What is the Double-Multivariate Profile Analysis? Double Multivariate Profile Analysis is very similar to the Profile Analysis.  Profile Analyses are mainly concerned with test scores, more specifically with profiles of test scores.  Why is that relevant? Tests are commonly administered in medicine, psychology, and education studies to rank participants of a study.  A profile shows differences in scores on the test.  If a psychologist administer…

What is the Sequential One-Way Discriminant Analysis? Sequential one-way discriminant analysis is similar to the one-way discriminant analysis.  Discriminant analysis predicts group membership by fitting a linear regression line through the scatter plot.  In the case of more than two independent variables it fits a plane through the scatter cloud thus separating all observations in one of two groups –one group to the “left” of the li…

What is the Factor Analysis? The Factor Analysis is an explorative analysis.  Much like the cluster analysis grouping similar cases, the factor analysis groups similar variables into dimensions.  This process is also called identifying latent variables.  Since factor analysis is an explorative analysis it does not distinguish between independent and dependent variables. Factor Analysis reduces the information in a model by reducing the dimension…

Factor analysis is a technique that is used to reduce a large number of variables into fewer numbers of factors.  This technique extracts maximum common variance from all variables and puts them into a common score.  As an index of all variables, we can use this score for further analysis.  Factor analysis is part of general linear model (GLM) and this method also assumes several assumptions: there is linear relationship, there is no multicollin…

What is the Profile Analysis? Profile Analysis is mainly concerned with test scores, more specifically with profiles of test scores.  Why is that relevant? Tests are commonly administered in medicine, psychology, and education studies to rank participants of a study.  A profile shows differences in scores on the test.  If a psychologist administers a personality test (e.g., NEO), the respondent gets a test profile in return showing the scores on…

Latent class analysis is a multivariate statistical analysis technique that is used in factor, cluster and regression techniques.  Latent class analysis is a technique where constructs are created from the number of other unobserved variables and these constructs are further used for regression analysis.  It is commonly used to classify the case into latent classes, and supports nominal, ordinal and continuous data.  Structural equation modeling…

Cluster analysis is a class of techniques that are used to classify objects or cases into relative groups called clusters.  Cluster analysis is also called classification analysis or numerical taxonomy.  In cluster analysis, there is no prior information about the group or cluster membership for any of the objects. Cluster Analysis has been used in marketing for various purposes.  Segmentation of consumers in cluster analysis is used on the basi…

Power analysis is directly related to tests of hypotheses. While conducting tests of hypotheses, the researcher can commit two types of errors: Type I error and Type II error. Statistical power mainly deals with Type II errors. It should be noted by the researcher that the larger the size of the sample, the easier it is for the researcher to achieve the 0.05 level of significance.   If the sample is too small, however, then the investigator migh…

Research has several distinctive stages: four of them include the research design, data analysis plan, the statistical analysis, and the reporting of the analysis.   This page will discuss the data analysis planning part of research, which is distinguished from the actual statistical analysis. The data analysis plan refers to determining how the data will be cleaned, transformed, and analyzed. Cleaning the Data The cleaning of data is the remov…