Space! For Star Trek fans it’s the final frontier - with all of vastly, hugely, mindboggling room it contains, it allows scientists and researchers of all persuasions to go where no one has gone before and explore worlds not yet explored. Like Star Trek fans, many mathematicians and statisticians are also interested in exploring the dynamics of space. From a statisticians point of view, our often data driven perspective means we are concerned with exploring data that exists in multi-dimensional space and trying to visualise it using as few dimensions as possible.

This presentation will outline the links between the analysis of categorical data, multi-dimensional space, and the reduction of this space. The technique we explore is correspondence analysis and we shall see how eigen- and singular value decomposition fit into this data visualisation technique. We shall therefore look at some of the fundamental aspects of correspondence analysis and the various ways in which categorical data can be visualised.