Principal component analysis for histogram-valued data

This paper introduces a principal component methodology for analysing histogram-valued data under the symbolic data domain. Currently, no comparable method exists for this type of data. The proposed method uses a symbolic covariance matrix to determine the principal component space. The resulting observations on principal component space are presented as polytopes for visualization. Numerical representation of the resulting polytopes via histogram-valued output is also presented. The necessary algorithms are included. The technique is illustrated on a weather data set.