Weighting of parts in compositional data and its applications

Publication Name
Proceedings of 13th International Conference of the ERCIM Working Group on Computational and Methodological Statistics (Virtual CMStatistics 2020)
Publisher
ECOSTA ECONOMETRICS AND STATISTICS
ISBN
978-9963-2227-9-7
Abstract
It often occurs in practice that it is sensible to give different weights to the variables involved in multivariate data analysis. The same holds for compositional data as multivariate observations carrying relative information, such as proportions or percentages. It can be convenient to apply weights to, for example, better accommodate differences in the quality of the measurements, the occurrence of zeros and missing values, or generally to highlight some specific features of compositional variables (i.e. parts of a whole). The characterisation of compositional data as elements of a Bayes space enables the definition of a formal framework to implement weighting schemes for the parts of a composition. This is formally achieved by considering a reference measure in the Bayes space alternative to the common uniform measure via the well-known chain rule. Unweighted centred log-ratio (clr) coefficients and isometric log-ratio (ilr) coordinates then allow representing compositions in the real space equipped with the (unweighted) Euclidean geometry, where ordinary multivariate statistical methods can be used and interpreted. We present these formal developments and use them to introduce a general approach to weighting parts in compositional data analysis. We demonstrate its practical usefulness on simulated and real-world data sets in the context of the earth sciences.
Year
2020
Category
Book Chapter
Output Tags
WP 1.2 Water resources and flood risk management (RESAS 2016-21)