Talk:Ordination (statistics)

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Hi 395...even though I wrote the article from a community ecology perspective, I'm confident that ordination qualifies as a statistical procedure applicable to many fields and is not unique to community ecology. For example, I read that mulitdimensional scaling was developed out of psychology, by Kruskal I believe, and principal components analysis definitely came from some other field. Neither of those techniques are used very heavily in community ecology now. As far as I know, only the correspondence analysis family (CA), particularly canonical CA really originated from or is unique to, ecology, and is very heavily used in that field...so I'm prone to make some changes to your edits but I need to make sure first

Jeeb 04:58, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Go ahead with your edits. I'm on Wikiholiday, so I won't be able to help with the editing in the short term.

I just had never heard of the term "ordination" before, and it seems that all of the citations at the Ordination page @ Oklahoma were to ecology papers/books. I could very well be wrong. -- hike395 00:58, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

No, you're right about that last bit--that page is exclusively directed towards ecological applications. In fact, I find that many web pages are so...I think the techniques are perhaps most heavily used in plant community ecology and I wonder how heavily they are used in psychology and other fields. Maybe just some slight word changes are in order.

Jeeb 01:28, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

The individual techniques (like PCA, MDS) are used in many different fields (see, e.g., Multidimensional scaling (in marketing) ).. I've just never heard the term "ordination" applied to all of these different techniques. Mind you, I like the term, I just had never heard of it before. -- hike395 06:03, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

I just found this page by looking up the term, as used in a course on microarray data analysis. I think it's a fairly general term in statistics. Here's a link to a general statistics book, covering ordination as one of its primary topics [1]. Of course, we probably need to look at the pages for other terms for the same thing, and merge/disambiguate where necessary --Kieran 08:48, 23 September 2005 (UTC)