EXPLORATORY APPROACHES TO SERIATION BY ASYMMETRIC MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING.

Seriation and multidimensional scaling are two techniques aimed at exploring relationships in dominance or proximity data matrices. Rodgers and Thompson (1992) argued that the two approaches can profitably interact in the analysis of asymmetric proximity matrices, and proposed a method that uses seriation to define an empirical ordering of the stimuli, and symmetric multidimensional scaling to scale the two separate triangles of the proximity matrix defined by this ordering (an approach anticipated by Method 3 in Gower (1977)). Following a similar concept, this paper proposes some procedures to explore seriation through asymmetric multidimensional scaling. The paper focuses on skew-symmetric components of a particular class of asymmetric matrices (including e.g. tournament or paired comparison matrices). Two short examples of possible applications are provided to illustrate the procedures, both in the dichotomous and quantitative case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]