Archetypal analysis: Contributions for estimating boundary cases in multivariate accommodation problem

The use of archetypal analysis is proposed in order to determine a set of representative cases that entail a certain percentage of the population, in the accommodation problem. A well-known anthropometric database has been used in order to compare our methodology with the common used PCA-approach, showing the advantages of our methodology: the level of accommodation is reached unlike the PCA approach, no more adjustments are necessary, the user can decide the number of archetypes to consider or leave the selection by a criterion. Unlike PCA, the objective of the archetypal analysis is obtaining extreme individuals, so it is the appropriate statistical technique for solving this type of problem. Archetypes cannot be obtained with PCA even if we consider all the components, as we show in the application. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.