BIO
The world around us is essentially multidimensional, consisting of the interaction between many factors that make up our environment, our physical beings and our social processes. Nothing is more complex than the natural world of which we are a part, where different components combine in intricate ways to produce life in all its forms. Whether one studies biology, ecology or sociology, the underlying issues are the same, and the area of statistics called multivariate analysis plays an important part in describing, interpreting, modelling and understanding these phenomena.
Michael Greenacre has more than 40 years’experience in the field of multivariate analysis, and is especially focused on the application of this advanced statistical field to solve real-world problems. He teaches a course in UPF’s management program, “Methods of Marketing Research”, which deals with multivariate data analysis in marketing, including consumer product perception, consumer sociology, predicting consumer behaviour and issues regarding big data. He is currently professor of the Masters of Science at the UPF Barcelona School of Management.
Michael obtained his doctorate in Paris in the 1970s and specialized in the area of correspondence analysis, a central technique in the visualization of large data sets. Since then he has written five books and co-edited four, the most recent being Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Data, available for free online at www.multivariatestatistics.org. He has also published 55 articles in various international journals, and is very much in demand as a short course presenter, having given courses and workshops in more than 15 countries, from northern Norway to Canada, South Africa to Australia.
Michael is also a keen musician and composer, has published two CDs of his own compositions, and has also written several satirical songs about statistics, which are available at youtube.com/StatisticalSongs.
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Research
RESEARCH THEMES
Correspondence analysis: Analysis of categorical data; data coding; distance-based multivariate analysis.
Data visualization: Visualization of high-dimensional data; communicating complex data to non-specialists; big data.
Ecology: Multivariate analysis in ecology; modelling biological-environmental relationships; growth models.
Sociology and marketing research: Survey data analysis; cross-national research; consumer product perception.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Blasius, J. & Greenacre, M. (eds): “Visualization and Verbalization of Data”, Chapman & Hall/ CRC Press, 2014.
Greenacre, M. and Primicerio, R.: “Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Data”, BBVA Foundation, Bilbao, free download at www.multivariatestatistics.org
Greenacre, M.: “Contribution biplots”, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 22(1), 107–122, 2013.
Greenacre, M.: “The contribution of rare objects in correspondence analysis”, Ecology, 94(1), 241–249, 2013
Greenacre, M.: “Fuzzy coding in constrained ordinations”, Ecology, 94(2), 280–286, 2013.
