• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.137-148
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• 2001

Compositional data found in many practical applications consist of non-negative vectors of proportions with the constraint which the sum of the elements of each vector is unity. It is well-known that the statistical analysis of compositional data suffers from the unit-sum constraint. Moreover, the non-linear pattern frequently displayed by the data does not facilitate the application of the linear multivariate techniques such as principal component analysis. In this paper we develop new type of principal component analysis for compositional data using Box-Cox contrast transformation. Numerical illustrations are provided for comparative purpose.