Compositional Data Analysis in the Geosciences: From Theory to Practice [Geological Society Special Publication, 264]

Since Karl Pearson wrote his paper on spurious correlation in 1897, a lot has been said about the statistical analysis of compositional data, mainly by geologists such as Felix Chayes. The solution appeared in the 1980s, when John Aitchison proposed to use logratios. Since then, the approach has seen a great expansion, mainly building on the idea of the 'natural geometry' of the sample space. Statistics is expected to give sense to our perception of the natural scale of the data, and this is made possible for compositional data using logratios. This publication will be a milestone in this process. This book will be of interest to geologists using statistical methods. It includes the intuitive justification of the methodology, convincing through case studies and presenting user-friendly software, which includes a section for those who need to see the proof of the mathematical consistency of the methods used.