Overview for Multiple Correspondence Analysis

Use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to explore the relationships of three or more categorical variables. Multiple correspondence analysis performs a simple correspondence analysis on a matrix of indicator variables, where each column of the matrix corresponds to a level of categorical variable. Instead of evaluating the two-way table of simple correspondence analysis, the multi-way table is collapsed into one dimension for this analysis. By moving from the simple to multiple procedure, you gain information on a potentially larger number of variables, but you may lose information on how rows and columns relate to each other.

For example, a researcher uses multiple correspondence analysis to examine how different categories of automobile accidents may relate to each other.