Correspondence analysis, when used to visualize relationships in a table of counts (for example, abundance data in ecology), has been frequently criticized as being too sensitive to objects (for example, species) that occur with very low frequency or in very few samples. In this statistical...

We survey a number of papers that have focused on the construction of cross-country data sets on average years of schooling. We discuss the construction of the different series, compare their profiles and construct indicators of their information content. The discussion focuses on a sample of...

The problem of outliers is well-known in statistics: an outlier is a value that is far from the general distribution of the other observed values, and can often perturb the results of a statistical analysis. Various procedures exist for identifying outliers, in case they need to receive special...

Hierarchical clustering is a popular method for finding structure in multivariate data, resulting in a binary tree constructed on the particular objects of the study, usually sampling units. The user faces the decision where to cut the binary tree in order to determine the number of clusters to...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on human capital and productivity and summarizes the results of my own work on the subject. On balance, the available evidence suggests that investment in education has a positive, significant and sizable effect on productivity growth. According to my...

Canonical correspondence analysis and redundancy analysis are two methods of constrained ordination regularly used in the analysis of ecological data when several response variables (for example, species abundances) are related linearly to several explanatory variables (for example,...

We construct a weighted Euclidean distance that approximates any distance or dissimilarity measure between individuals that is based on a rectangular cases-by-variables data matrix. In contrast to regular multidimensional scaling methods for dissimilarity data, the method leads to biplots of...