The Institute for Statistics and Mathematics is pleased to invite you to the next research seminar, taking place on campus:

Patrick Mair (Department of Psychology, Harvard University, USA):
Multidimensional Scaling in Action: Recent Developments and Implementation
Wednesday, December 6, 2023, 17:00, online talk

Abstract:
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a widely applied multivariate exploratory technique used in many fields of research. MDS represents proximities among objects as distances among points in a low-dimensional configuration space (with given dimensionality), allowing researchers to explore similarity structures among these objects. The main MDS package in R is called "smacof". This talk gives an overview of various recent MDS developments and corresponding implementations in smacof. In the first part the focus is on MDS goodness-of-fit assessment, options for interpretation of the configuration, Procrustes alignment, and various MDS variants. The second part deals with a popular MDS variant called "unfolding" where the aim is to jointly scale rows and columns of a rectangular dissimilarity matrix that consists of rankings or ratings.
Within this context, ordinal unfolding, row-conditional unfolding, and configurationally restricted solutions are presented.

We aim to stream all on-campus talks via Zoom. A direct link to the stream will be posted on our website.

For further information and the seminar schedule, please see:
www.wu.ac.at/en/statmath/research/resseminar