English

Compositional Cubes: A New Concept for Multi-factorial Compositions

Methodology 2022-01-26 v1

Abstract

Compositional data are commonly known as multivariate observations carrying relative information. Even though the case of vector or even two-factorial compositional data (compositional tables) is already well described in the literature, there is still a need for a comprehensive approach to the analysis of multi-factorial relative-valued data. Therefore, this contribution builds around the current knowledge about compositional data a general theory of work with k-factorial compositional data. As a main finding it turns out that similar to the case of compositional tables also the multi-factorial structures can be orthogonally decomposed into an independent and several interactive parts and, moreover, a coordinate representation allowing for their separate analysis by standard analytical methods can be constructed. For the sake of simplicity, these features are explained in detail for the case of three-factorial compositions (compositional cubes), followed by an outline covering the general case. The three-dimensional structure is analysed in depth in two practical examples, dealing with systems of spatial and time dependent compositional cubes. The methodology is implemented in the R package robCompositions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.10321,
  title  = {Compositional Cubes: A New Concept for Multi-factorial Compositions},
  author = {Kamila Fačevicová and Peter Filzmoser and Karel Hron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.10321},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:02:00.569Z