Multidimensional Scaling

It was a nice question, for the Cape de Verds were about 500 miles to the north of us, and the African coast about 700 miles to the east. On the whole, as the wind was coming round to north, we thought that Sierra Leone might be best,... James Armitage in “The Adventure of the “Gloria Scott”” Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a mathematical tool that uses proximities between observations to produce their spatial representation. In contrast to the techniques considered so far, MDS does not start from the raw multivariate data matrix X, but from an (n × n) dissimilarity or distance matrix, D, with the elements δij and dij, respectively. Hence, the underlying dimensionality of the data under investigation is in general not known.